If you’re so inclined, you can check out my Spotify 2019 “Top Songs” playlist for what I had on repeat this year, but if you want to know the songs I played even when I was just screwing around on YouTube and what I was thinking/why I liked it, this list is for you!
I spent a lot of 2019 listening to recent Korean pop and hip-hop. That’s probably not a surprise considering what I’ve been working on across this year.
And of course, I’m still listening to Hamilton.
Title: Love U
Artist: Monsta X
What Had Me Hooked: A few weeks ago I made a tweet about how Monsta X makes “some good songs about fucking” and “Love U”, one of their newer English releases that’ll be on their upcoming Valentine’s Day release, is one of those songs. I love this song because it is so semi-subtly hornt. Are they talking about not being able to say the word “fuck” on the radio or are they talking about not being able to say “I love you” in Korean on Western radio? Who knows! It’s exciting!
If you’re in or adjacent to Korean pop culture fandom spaces and somehow thought we’d be ending 2019 without further antiblackness from idols or their fans…
a) I’m not sure how you got to that conclusion considering how bad 2019’s been
b) You were wrong.
You were wrong, and now we have another month where an idol has thoroughly proven themselves to give less than zero shits about Black people and Black fans.
Have we had a month yet where an idol hasn’t fucked up on some way? Have we had a month in 2019 that wasn’t rife with antiblackness directly revolving around Korean pop and/or hip-hop as genres or within their fandom spaces?
This was originally posted on Patreon in November without any real extra-text.
One of the most interesting (and frustrating) things about talking about fandom and media and the racism present in these spaces is how many people view my position as one that has any power in fandom.
Note: This essay contains critical references to and some descriptions content in fanworks that is/seen as objectionable including underage characters and sexualized/eroticized racism.
I spent a lot of my time in graduate school arguing that “literature” as a word could encompass entire worlds of media that were consistently dismissed as not being sacred or classical enough.
I found the potential for literature in pretty much everything that had text in it and made a point of challenging the expectations that my classmates had about lit on a regular basis.
So I get that urge to be like “fan fiction should be as valued and as valid as literature” and I even embrace it – up to a point.
And that point comes when you look at the differences between how literature and fanfiction are critiqued. Or rather – how we’re allowed to engage critically with them.Read More »
Few fandoms fill me with the kind of anger that the Star Wars fandom does.
In fact, there are times where I’d go so far as to say that I hate it.
Times like Wednesday night.
When I got home Wednesday night from my first A.C.E concert, I was flying high. It’d been a great night with fantastic music and a stellar performance. Everywhere I looked, I saw fans loving their thing and loving that they got to share that thing with other fans. For a few blissful hours, I’d experienced fandom at its best: people coming together in joy and in celebration over something brilliant.
And then I was rudely reminded that the Star Wars fandom exists and that a whole huge chunk of the Rey/Kylo shippers who dominate much of the fandom discourse is made up of just really terrible people.
There’s nothing about my Twitter account that clearly pings the mind and calls me out as an obvious fan of K-pop – or… pretty much any form of nerdery outside of a single comic.
My profile picture is a picture of my face, not a Korean artist or a superhero. My display name and @ aren’t a fandom in-joke. (Although the little leaf/tree emoji in my display name is a reference to Kim Namjoon of BTS. I did it for his birthday in September and then… just never changed it.)
I do get that the only notably nerdy thing about my twitter account is, at first glance, my header image of Lunella Lafayette from Marvel Comics’ Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur. And if you don’t know anything about her comic, it’s easy to assume it’s not nerdy.
But between my apparently invisible fannishness and my very visible Blackness, no one ever assumes I know anything about K-pop. Or Star Wars. Or fandom.
The first thing is my thing, you know?
I’m into a ton of different fandoms and when faced with having to try and choose one to represent fully across my Twitter profile, I kind of froze and chose one thing. So that inability some fans have to recognize me based on my profile and whatnot? That’s on me.
But then there’s the thing where Black people aren’t necessarily read as fans across many different fandom spaces around the world.Read More »
My interest in Bond fandom comes and goes depending on what content is coming out. I got hyped for the comics from Dynamite (so good, for real) and then that waned because I have a short attention span. When news of No Time To Die started coming out and it looked like we were finally getting back on track, I was like “okay, let’s do it”.
Everything about No Time To Die has me hyped up so far. The cast – new and returning – looks wonderful. The director – Cary Fukunaga – is both talented and a major babe. My anticipation for this film is pretty high and the trailer does an excellent job of returning me to my Bond Babe roots.Read More »
I’m just so pleased about how well “hood cosplay” as a term works for my needs across my project on antiblackness in the k-pop industry and its fandom spaces. I had to do a video!
Back in in the beginning of April, when I first started this project and the idea for this section started to take form, I screenshot and shared a tweet from a K-pop fan (though the group they preferred, escapes me) that said:
“I don’t know why black people are even stupid enough to like K-pop. It isn’t for you. Go listen to rap.”
Go listen to rap.
Imagine having the nerve to tell Black fans to “go listen to rap” because – in this case – you were frustrated by yet another conversation about cultural appropriation in the K-pop industry.
Imagine being that much of a walnut that you zoom on past the fact that even the cutesiest of girl groups will have something that’s attempting to be a rap line and rap breaks in their songs – specificallyso that you can tell Black people to get the hell out of “your” fandom space/genre of choice.
This is just a taste of what international fandom spaces are like for Black K-pop fans on social media. When we are even a tiny bit critical of the way our idols try to emulate our cultures, folks tell us that we need to get out of the fandom because there’s no way that we belong.
They tell us to return to rap music, the same rap music that our favorite idols and artists are listening to and performing in South Korea.
The original thread is here but I have blocked tons of people to maintain my boundaries so I have copied the tweets over here for ease of access for people who still want to see the tweets but can’t because I’ve blocked them for whatever reason.
Like I absolutely get the sentiment behind “all fanfiction is okay” but I also have seen many antiblack stories across my lifetime in fandom where black characters are abused/objectified/enslaved/torn down usually by/for white characters-
And those stories AREN’T okay, friends. Like the sentiment “all fanfiction is okay” (like it’s fine, don’t worry about it, women are making it so let them have their fun) is one of those Lil Fandom Things that makes me wonder…
Do people realize that they’re leaving out a lot of people in those sentiments?Read More »
This morning I woke up to see
that Amber Liu (formerly a part of SM’s f(x), a popular South Korean
girl group) was trending on Twitter due to her apology for something that she’d
said. The apology in question was for well… antiblackness. Turns out, that
when Amber went on Just Kidding News – a satirical news show on YouTube – last
week, she brought some internalized antiblackness along with her for the ride.
On the show, Amber was one of several people reacting to a video of a man in California, Steve Foster, responding with anger after being accosted by police officers because he was eating a sandwich on a train station’s platform. In the now private JKN video, Amber said that guy being accosted “just fucking deserved it” because police officers (automatically or inherently) deserved respect.
Mercy is one awkward, itchy mess of a queer werewolf. But… it’s working for her. Somehow.
Notes: This is set four months after Girl, Get Wrecked and is goopy fluff written for @zrhueiao on twitter! Thank you for your patience – as I was sick as heck and pretty much incapable of focusing for the past uh… like 10 days at least. (It was also called “Howl If You’re Happy” but uh… I’m repurposing that tile for something extra queer.)
This floof inspired about three different potential (and similarly queer) spin-offs that don’t all involve queer werewolves but do introduce you all to a new member of the Selkie Squad. (And one is a short and supremely NSFW story directly inspired by this that will be up this weekend on Dreamwidth.)
Most of the time, Mercy likes being the only werewolf on St. Thomas. There aren’t any petty pack politics or the kind of hierarchy that she’d left the States to escape – considering that she was firmly on the bottom back home. Outside of the selkie squad and the were-tiger that she’d scented on a day trip to Puerto Rico, there aren’t that many shifters on the island that Mercy has come to call home.
In essence, she’s the alpha of the island.
Wild.
But being the alpha, a lone wolf on an island where everyone
is a part of one close-knit community or another –
First of all, Ming Na Wen plays Melinda May, not May Parker. (May Parker, by the way, is Peter Parker’s alternate universe daughter…) I got my Marvel wires crossed because I was multi-tasking on something while I recorded this! My bad.
The title is a bit of a misrepresentation. I actually talk about a single moment in the podcast that kind of disrupted my ability to enjoy what I was listening to 100% (It dropped down to like… 89.78%, not gonna lie.) and then I talked about the casual antiblackness I’ve been noticing from popular Korean and Korean American bloggers in the past year as I’ve worked on my project and how often it comes up with media criticism.
At the end of the day, it’s not like I was expecting a single person on this podcast to talk about East Asian antiblackness or antiblackness in general. So I’m not actually trying to place my own burden of responsibility on them. But I feel like it was a bruise on an otherwise genuinely awesome episode because there was no need to zero in on Black Panther in the way they did, I feel like… it wasn’t a great moment and it was unnecessary on top of that.
Honestly, the episode is across the board good, but it’s like… that moment threw me off my groove so solidly that well… Yes, I made a 36 minute long podcast episode about a moment in someone else’s podcast.
Here’s the link to the episode of The Tablo Podcast I’m talking about!
From GoTranscript! [Editing is still in progress, but I wanted to post it.]
Welcome to the inaugural episode of Stitch Talks Ish.
This is a mini-podcast that I’ll be doing on my website public content that is available to everyone who subscribes or just shows up on my website and listens to my content. This first episode of Stitch Talks Ish is subtitled “Stitch talks about The Tablo Podcast episode on racism”. Really, it’s that I’m going to talk about a moment in the podcast, not the whole thing. I’m an infrequent listener of other podcasts because I do listen to them, I work in marketing, so there are times where it is literally just reasonable to pop my headphones in and put on a good podcast and just enjoy other people going about their lives.
Tablo of Epik High is a really good podcast. It’s really
entertaining, really solid guests, really good introspection. It’s a good
podcast listen to while you’re at work and I’ve been in and out, so a couple of
episodes behind, but the 15th episode came out today, it looks like. Eddie, Nam
and Eric Nam who is on his own podcast with Spotify for K-pop was on and they
were talking about racism and it was just honestly really funny because it was
like, “Well, we don’t want to talk about K-pop. We’re going to talk about
something light and fun. We’re going to talk about racism.” It was an
hour-long almost. It was about 54 minutes long according to Spotify on my end.
Eric was like, “Are you serious?”
Honestly, I really love that
they brought hilarious notes to this topic because obviously somebody who
writes and talks about racism in fandom and in media, my experiences with
dealing with racism as a queer black person in America, I find it really
fascinating and really helpful when other people talk about racism and bring up
how it shapes our lives and just put a little light into it, in the situation’s
we go through and the kind of poke fun at experiencing racism honestly, so it
is a good episode.
If you stop here, that’s all you need to know. If you keep going, honestly, there was- one and a half moments across the podcast that pinged me.
Over the past three years, I’ve documented multiple people who’ve used real world (offline) politics and historic and present atrocities to silence claims of dissent and derail criticism across different fandom spaces.
Police brutality, extrajudicial executions of people of color, and the school to prison pipeline are just a few examples of what people consistently repurpose across fandom in order to stop the critical ball from rolling.
Back in May 2019, I wrote an audiopost script about “Real Racism” in fandom and how people use the idea of “real racism” to derail people talking about racism in fandom spaces – which apparently can’t ever have racism in its borders.
To many people – who aren’t exclusively white members of fandom – the racism that many other people see and discuss in fandom spaces doesn’t count as “real racism”. Identifiable racism, to them, involves immediate physical pain to a real person of color, hate crimes, or traceable harassment from people saying clearly that they’re harassing someone because of their race.
To them, because much of what fans of color have detailed as fandom racism don’t involve those easily identifiable aspects that mark racism as a thing that only outsiders to fandom commit, they can’t acknowledge that fandom racism is real racism.
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