#his profile says it is 2000+ in wiki fandom

[crazydaymycrazyway]

The crown prince of Xianle Xie Lian, a literal seventeen year old, the first time he ascended: I'm learning, I'm young and I have amazing friends

Jun Wu, a 2000+ super senior citizen: *smiles*

Bai Wuxiang, internally: *in a mocking tone* I'm learning, I'm young amd I have amazing friends. WELL OBVIOUSLY THAT AIN'T GONNA BE HELPING YOU! I WAS RAISED BY WOLVES BITCH, BETRAYED BY THE PEOPLE WHO I TRUSTED, LOST MY GODHOOD, DIGNITY AND LIFE, GOT TUMORS ON MY FACE, KILLED AND STOMPED OVER THE CORPSES OF THE GODS WHO DARED BETRAY ME! I WAS BETRAYED AND I BETRAYED AND I'M WASHED ALL OVER BY SINS AND I'M STILL SURVIVING WITH MY SHIT TOGETHER ON TOP OF ALL! AND YOU THINK YOU CAN WALK AWAY UNSCATHED?! BE ALL PURE?! WATCH ME BITCH!! LETS SEE IF YOU CAN FOLLOW YOUR SHITTY "BODY IN ABYSS HEART IN PARADISE"!!!

[reginavulturum]

Terry's Birthday: Fandom, the Internet, and Citations

Or, a too long, too in depth essay on a fictional character's birthday

If you aren't thinking I'm a total nerd by the time you're done reading this than you didn't really read this. But, let's start at the beginning. Recently I posted a timeline I made for "Batman Beyond" and in the time since I made that post there's been something I've seen pop up in tags which I'd never heard of before. A few people were saying that Terry's birthday is August 18th. I was really interested in the source of this claim because I had no recollection of ever seeing it anywhere before now. I looked it up on google (as you do) and found this date scattered around the internet. Case closed, right? But I quickly realized there was a consistent problem on every site I came across. None of them cited a source for Terry's alleged August 18th birthday.

Just look it up yourself and you'll find that the date is ubiquitous across the internet. Yet, as far as I can tell after all my research, it's also completely unconfirmed. I mean, I may have missed something, but if I have than someone else is going to have to point it out to me. I also made a post prior to this one asking people to cite a source for Terry's birthday and no one has so far. You can have a look at that post if you want to know what I consider a good source on this subject. In any case, if this date or any other had been confirmed in any piece of media or in an interview with any DC creator involved in Batman Beyond than I think I would have found a citation for that source somewhere by now.

Right now it kind of seems like August 18th is fanon that's been recycled into "canon". This seems to have happened through a process of source-less wikipedia edits being parroted across reddit threads, sites featuring profiles of comic heroes, other wikis, etc. The less popular June 27th birthday for Terry seems to have gone through the same process. Here are links to some of these sites: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

As my research continued I came across some possible witness testimony of the first mentions of these birthdates:

a.) In this archived thread from the DCAU wiki, in quotations below, I've copied an excerpt of an exchange between two users that I feel is most relevant to this post (emphasis mine):

"So, I've noticed lately that a lot of different sites have been stating Terry's birthday to be August 18th with various years attached to the date. The earliest mention of which I could find is an edit to his wikipedia page in 2008 (which prior to the change stated his birthday was June 27th). I don't remember a mention of when he was born on the show or tie-in comics, and the third volume of comics didn't come out until 2010, so would anyone here know where these dates originate from? -- ReachingForRevolution (talk) 17:48, September 26, 2013 (UTC)"

"I've done some extensive timeline research, and I never came across a good source for those dates. All I saw was a wikipedia edit war with those two dates, but neither is correct AFAIK. The most cited year of birth is 2023, which is speculation as well, but there's at least some foundation for that. --Tupka217 17:56, September 26, 2013 (UTC)"

b.) A similar claim was made in this thread. The relevant excerpt, written by the user "Yojimbo" on October 16, 2023, is in quotations below (emphasis mine):

"No official birth date was ever given.

There was a wikipedia edit war in the 2000s but no source was ever given for either disputed date, June 27, 2023 and August 18, 2023."

As I've travelled down this rabbit hole, I've begun to suspect I won't be able to find exactly where it began, but this is as close as I've gotten. Allegedly, sometime around 2008, there was an edit war on Terry McGinnis' wikipedia page between at least two users over the birthdates of June 27th and August 18th. Now, how or why that edit war even started, I don't know. Why those dates, I also don't know. What I do know is that August 18th is the birthdate that gained the most popularity in the end and spread across the internet.

I'm not trying to step on anyone's toes with this post or call anyone out, really. If anything, this post exists because the subject was interesting to me and I've found the journey enjoyable. If you want to say Terry's birthday is June 27th or August 18th, then please do. Fandom is about fun, not perfectly sourced and cited dissertations on fictional teenagers' birthdays...unless, of course, that sort of thing is fun for you. I know I've loved every minute researching for and writing this...because I'm a massive nerd...but I certainly don't adhere to a strict reading of the timeline myself which is something I plan on covering in an upcoming addendum to my timeline.

In summary, my own research has produced no officially confirmed birthday for Terry McGinnis. This leads me to believe that August 18th and June 27th are fanon birthdates. It may be that I've just not found the citation for one or the other of these dates so I'm open to anyone who can provide me a good source. But really, none of this matters in the grand scheme of things, although it's interesting to see the way user edited/moderated wikis can sometimes bring less clarity rather than more. I'm sure this isn't the only example of that. Assuming I'm right and these birthdates are fanon, I wouldn't consider this a cautionary tale or anything so dramatic. Instead, I'd say this was a case study in the interaction between fandom collated information about fictional works as it exists across the internet and why the adage, "cite your sources", will never die...or something like that...

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

According to a narrative that’s currently popular in the mainstream media and the more lowbrow end of academia, the recent surge in popularity of the American nationalist right was caused by the radicalization of nerds. Dweeby white manchildren, so the story goes, retreated into video games, the science fiction fandom, and anonymous online forums like 4chan, and formed misogynistic, resentment-fueled subcultures within them. These neckbearded neo-Nazis gradually coalesced into the ‘alt-right,’ an internet hate machine that contributed greatly to Toupee Hitler’s otherwise inexplicable rise.

There are many versions of this narrative. The common feature is the ascription of Trump’s electoral victory — and, in some cases, the surge in right-populism all across the Western world — to the vile machinations of movements of fascistic, internet-based nerds; but the details vary. One version, laid down in a popular Tumblr post (at the time of writing, it has over 22,000 notes), ascribes the rise of the alt-right to a successful campaign by Stormfront to turn 4chan Nazi. Another version blames it on Gamergate, allegedly a hate campaign born out of a misogynist’s attempt to “punish his ex-girlfriend” that served as a breeding ground for far-right extremism, and as the petri dish that they organized in before taking over America. The Z-list Youtube celebrity Zinnia Jones has described Gamergate as “one of the worst things ever to happen” because it “enabled Trump” — apparently, a piece of fandom drama ranks up there with the Spanish flu pandemic, the Mongol conquests, the Black Death, the invention of the nuclear bomb, the post-Columbian plagues that depopulated the Americas, and the unfortunate events of the 1940s.

Deployments of the narrative abound. A popular Medium “32-minute read” bears the headline, “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.” Politico insists that “the Trump campaign … paid rapt attention to meme culture from the start.” CNET helpfully explains that “what began as a backlash to a debate about how video games portray women led to an internet culture that ultimately helped sweep Donald Trump into office.” Chris Grant, editor-in-chief of Polygon, complains that “the overlap between Gamergate and Trump(ism) is astounding. GG was like the trial run for this whole mess.” The Independent, a British paper, speaks out against the “very geeky” Trump supporters of the alt-right, and claims that “The uncomfortable truth, that should worry anyone praying for a Trump defeat, is that the Alt-right following he has tapped into are more numerous and unpredictable than traditional political commentators understand.” And so on. And for every article that explicitly draws a connection between internet-based youth countercultures and Trump, there are a dozen more that simply make a point of mentioning them in the same breath, and let the reader work out the connection for himself. Trump… Gamergate… Trump… neckbeards… Trump… 4chan… Trump!

At this point, it’s worth taking a step back from the phenomenon of heavy internet users failing for the first time to line up in lockstep behind the Democrats, and looking at the bigger picture. Trump’s electoral success was not driven by the alt-right; it was driven by the usual factors. To make a long story short, Trump won because Clinton ran a bad campaign and took unpopular positions on the issues. Insofar as the election was unusual, it wasn’t because Trump posted a picture of a cartoon frog — Clinton made her own bids for pop-cultural relevance, as did her husband when he took out his saxophone on Arsenio Hall’s show in 1992 — but because Clinton, in violation of a long-standing norm, directly insulted large swathes of the voting population with her “basket of deplorables” line.

Trump’s success is also not unusual in a global context. In recent years, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz won a supermajority in Hungary and proceeded to rewrite the Hungarian constitution to declare Hungary a Christian nation and ensure the electoral dominance of Fidesz for the foreseeable future. Britain voted to leave the European Union, and politicians like Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Andrzej Duda became household names among the set that pays attention to international politics. Trump is not a uniquely American phenomenon; if anything, he’ll likely prove to be a more moderate parallel to the trends sweeping Europe, just as FDR paralleled the European extremists of the Depression years. Of course, these trends are not just sweeping Europe, as is proven by the victories in Asia of politicians like Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte.

This global trend simply could not have been caused by an obscure piece of American fandom drama. Gamergate and 4chan cannot have contributed to the rise of the right, because the rise of the right happened to approximately the same extent in countries outside the Anglosphere and outside the cultural reach of Anglosphere nerd culture. Even Vox, which once described Trump as “the first Republican nominee whose ethos owes more to 4chan and Gamergate than it does the Bible,” has found that “polarization is accelerating fastest among those using the internet the least.”

Nor could Trump’s rise to power have been substantially helped along by pictures of cartoon frogs. A full analysis of Trump’s victory is beyond the scope of this article, but it borders on delusion to believe that Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were flipped by 4chan trolls, rather than by such ordinary factors as Trump’s more popular positions on the key issues of immigration and trade and Clinton’s failure to run a functional campaign.

The internet has, however, reshaped American politics; just not in the way pundits say it has. The main effects have been on the left, not the right.

The most obvious effect is that leftists, especially those in the fields that shape and promulgate leftist doctrine, spend a lot of time online. Journalists spend less time cultivating networks of sources and more time ‘building their brand’ and interacting with other journalists; academics network on Twitter; and so on. Connection matters more than ever, and the internet has weakened local scenes and replaced them with placeless ones. Indie game developers from all over the world, for example, can compete for the attention of the largely U.S.-coastal ‘mainstream’ games journalism industry, whose writers are of course all on the same mailing lists, not to mention following each other on Twitter. Journalists, academics, political advisors and the like disappear into their own world — a world where it’s acceptable to wage war on large parts of one’s own audience, or to lead a mainstream presidential candidate to insult a large part of the voting population. And the scenes that are best able to capture the attention of this world will gain power, influence, and the propagation of their norms.

One scene that has been markedly successful in capturing the attention of the journalistic world is the one that developed from the pay-to-post forum Something Awful. Originally a humor site, it became one of the most influential sites on the internet — you probably know that 4chan was created by a Something Awful regular, and that its initial userbase drew heavily from SA. Its influence on politics, however, extends far beyond 4chan. Buckle up, folks: you’re in for a long, confusing, and terrible ride.

In the essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” Mark Fisher, who was roundly condemned for writing it and killed himself three years later, attacked not only the identitarianism that has metastasized in academia since the ’60s, an identitarianism in which “the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender,” but also the “paralysing feeling of guilt and suspicion which hangs over left-wing twitter like an acrid, stifling fog” and the “kangaroo courts and character assassinations” that are, as anyone who has observed the state of the left today, overwhelmingly common. This guilt and suspicion, these kangaroo courts and character assassinations, need not have anything to do with politics; in one memorable instance, a once-popular Tumblr communist blogger with the sadly real URL of “fuckyeahmarxismleninism” was dogpiled and laughed into irrelevance for admitting to watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with his daughters. This was seen as a far worse faux pas than even his support of North Korea. I am, unfortunately, not making this up; I saw it all happen firsthand.

These aren’t the kangaroo courts of Stalin. What they are is the schoolyard courts of Helldump, a Something Awful subforum created for the strange purpose of being a schoolyard court. The Something Awful wiki speaks for itself here: “The official birth of Helldump 2000 spawned a new creative outlet for pedophiles, racists, bigots, Ron Paul supporters, gun zealots, defenders of anime and otherwise crap posters to be outed in a thorough, convincing manner by an astute civilian task force. Essentially, it checks and balances the stupidity that seeps its way into the forums as a whole, although (unfortunately) it does not function as a preventive treatment (shit posters still propagate at an alarming rate). Rather, the modus operandi of Helldump is to profile and insult the (assumed) poor goon for his questionable views, and in turn function as a virtual tourniquet in an attempt to stop the bleeding, as well as force said shit poster into online anonymity and/or reclusiveness.” In practice, most of what Helldump did was dogpile furries.

As a side note, internet lore has it that the population of Helldump regulars itself skewed furry. This is not terribly out of the norm for Something Awful, the admin of which employed Shmorky for ten years before firing him on the sensible grounds that he was “secretly into pedophilia incest diaper shitting roleplay” and allegedly “would get way too excited over [SA admin Lowtax’s kids] coming to the office.” (Shmorky has also been reported to at least have once been friends with Rebecca Sugar, the creator of the TV show Steven Universe, which has a remarkably Shmorky-like art style and has as its target demographic the same Tumblr crowd that Shmorky fell in with.)

Zoe Quinn herself was a SA member under the username Eris, and participated in at least one Helldump dogpile. It’s often believed that Gamergate began when her ex-boyfriend posted a ‘callout’ of her abusive behaviors, cheating, and so on — the “Zoe Post” — on 4chan, but he actually joined Something Awful to post it there first. He was quickly banned for it, and the ban message reads: “Thank you for joining the Something Awful Forums in order to post a giant loving psychopathic helldump about your ex-girlfriend in the forum about video games.” (The original phrasing was “giant fucking psychopathic helldump,” but SA has wordfilters.) The belief in a connection between Helldump and ‘callout culture’ is held by the SA moderators themselves.

Helldump was closed after two years, and many of its regulars migrated to a different subforum, Laissez’s Fair, “the original Dirtbag Left.” The SA wiki entry for LF helpfully explains that it was “opened up to put all the Ron Paul shit” and became a “refugee holding bay” for Helldump after the latter was closed. “Over time people started making effort posts about such things the nightmare that is our criminal justice system, social justice in general, as well as the ideas of Karl Marx. The lack of moderation was made up for by basically shouting people out of the forum who were stupid MRAs and concern trolls. Gradually the complexion of the forum shifted from liberal to socialist.” Eventually, LF was closed, because “LF posters went internet detective on mods and posted death threats,” including several to then-President Obama.

At least two regulars on Helldump and LF went on to get careers in journalism. Jeb Lund, who wrote a vague and rambling essay about his posting career for Gawker, went by “Boniface” and “Mobutu Sese Seko” on Something Awful. Under the former pseudonym, he threatened a Helldump victim: “how about you promise never to post here again on pain of being permabanned, otherwise there’s no reason for all the posters here with lexis-nexis to stop at just your email addresses and not go straight for driver’s license photos and info, tax records… the list goes on and on.” Sam Kriss was (or at least was widely believed to be) Dead Ken, as well as Red Ken, Dub Mapocho, Agenbite Inwit, Dead Skeng, and presumably other accounts. After LF was removed from SA, its regulars established and migrated to explicitly Communist forums offsite; he was a regular on one such forum, “tHE rHizzonE”, which was later given some sort of contest by the leftist magazine The Baffler, whose editor was “a fan” of said forum. (Sam Kriss has written for the Baffler.)

Many people from the more leftist parts of SA went on to become “Weird Twitter,” which was puffed by outlets like Buzzfeed. John Herrman and Katie Notopoulos, the authors of the linked piece, gravitated toward LF superstars on Twitter and tried to replicate their style. Some of them, such as Lund, Kriss, David Thorpe (who had a regular column on SA and is now a music journalist), Virgil Texas, Jon Hendren (who was, as docevil, once an admin of the “Fuck You And Die” (FYAD) subforum, but was shamed off the site after a bizarre incident involving a charity event featuring Smash Mouth and Guy Fieri), and Alex Nichols, parlayed those connections into posting careers.

Herrman also profiled a Weird Twitter poster, @CelestialBeard, whose claim to fame was tweeting a lot, and being followed by Herrman on Twitter. @CelestialBeard has since become a transgender brony.

From Weird Twitter, which attracted and assimilated people who weren’t active in SA’s leftist cliques (such as Felix Biederman and Virgil Texas, who just lurked), came Chapo Trap House, darling of every obscure Slate clone from Brooklyn to Queens. Chapo has featured several SA regulars, including Alex Nichols (@Lowenaffchen), who was active on LF as Golden Lion Tamarin (his Twitter username used to be @GLDNLNTMRN), and Dan O’Sullivan (@Bro_Pair), a now-banned former SA moderator whose username is now Fat Curtain Dweller. It’s interesting that a podcast heralded for ‘actually giving a shit’ comes from a subculture that began as pure trolling.

Providing a precise accounting of the impact of Something Awful on the Anglosphere left is difficult, as it would be with any subculture. The history is oral, largely lost, deliberately obfuscated, and shrouded in irony. It is likely that nothing will come of it, and that, in the end, it will be the farce mirroring the tragedy of neoconservatism: an insane political movement that developed out of a bizarre and insular clique in a world where having the right connections matters above all else, writing things that very few people care about but doing a great deal of damage along the way. It seems that the norms of Helldump have become callout culture, SA users’ trolling of the libertarians corralled in LF have become the dirtbag left, and some of those responsible have written for not only Gawker and Buzzfeed, but also The New York Times.

At the very least, the overlap in population is clear and suggestive. Someone can go from being repeatedly banned from a pay-to-post forum for something involving the word “nigger” to writing for the Guardian, the Atlantic and the New York Times, largely on the dubious strength of his Twitter account and forum fame. There are few lessons that can be drawn from this; the obvious one is that perhaps the media rewards expertise less than connectedness.

I’m told that this is what Gamergate was about. But there are many things I’ve been told Gamergate was about. The internet is something awful indeed. And it’s only going to get worse.

[gaypersonalscouple03]

kissing a peewee first time Latah

THAT ARE A MUST SEE!

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[minusram]

what’s my age again?

absolutely indisputable information:

the squad’s birthdays & zodiacs* [d/m/y]:

teru 13/4/98 tiger

mob 12/5/98 tiger

ritsu 2/7/99 rabbit

shou 1/12/99 rabbit

year of the tiger was: 28/01/1998 - 15/02/1999

year of the rabbit was: 16/02/1999 - 04/02/2000

the manga covers reigen’s birthday, october 10th

almost certainly canon:

current day is 2012 for the entire run of the series so far*****

where it gets noodly:

the months are, at first glance, a shitstorm**

shigeo is fourteen. okay, series starts after may 12th. that’s plenty of time to get to october

ritsu is thirteen. getting a little cramped, but still manageable! we can fit eight story arcs into 3.3 months if we have to

shou is thirteen. alright whaaaaaat???

IF shou is 13 AND teru and shige, but teru is first in the birth order is 14 THEN it must be between dec 1st 2012 and april 13th 2013

YOU MIGHT NOTICE THIS DOESN’T COVER OCTOBER 10th 2012, REIGEN’S CANONICAL, ONSCREEN, 28th BIRTHDAY. fuckery

now, you could solve this by breaking canon!

move shou’s birthday to late ‘98

now he is older than ritsu instead of younger

so any time after july 2nd and before dec 1st [2012] will have everyone be the correct age

this would make his new zodiac tiger

but there is an insidious, terrible answer that takes all these facts into account:

SHOU IS FUCKING TWELVE

here’s how it works:

we know that shou is thirteen two ways: from his zodiac/birthdate & the likelihood of 2012 being the present day AND because it says so at the top of his profile

however, we only got this profile as an omake attached to chapter 92.02

omakes are unmoored in time, mostly. for example, we get a christmas comic when it’s christmas for us, not for the characters

but if we chronologically link the omake to the events of the chapter it’s attached to, then we can say that as of that chapter, shou was 13***

using this reasoning, ANYTHING BEFORE CHAPTER 92 IS FAIR GAME for how old he is, it just depends on how you schedule the story arcs

the birthdays all still work, ritsu is still 13, mob and teru are still 14, all is as it should be

as long as we make shou 12

~~footnotes under the cut~~

*birth years are a mixture of canon and common sense. yes, there are other years of tiger and rabbit, but how likely is it that mp100 is a period piece? or that it takes place in the future? i’ll tell you: UNLIKELY //edit: an anonymous contributor points out that the series began publication in april 2012

**my issues with figuring it out have been varied and numerous. i believe i have finally reached my final form, but no promises

***so during 7th division.... he was twelve. a preteen. and he had a b-day offscreen sometime between then and when his dad fucked shit up. this theory could also solve the ritsu/july issue, but i haven’t checked for explicit in-text mentions of ritsu’s age. so, again, no promises

****world domination arc [according to the wiki] ends at chapter 91. so depending on your preference, that arc could take place before or after shou’s bday. because ch 92 is either a denouement chapter or the beginning of a new arc, you can argue for as much of a time skip between them as you like

//edit: *****the inestimable eyedelater has pointed out that the date is pegged at 2014 in the published version of volume 9. however, this conflicts with the zodiacs in the character profiles. those omakes were attached to chapters published in volume 13. if they were printed as above, then this is an irreconcilable canon error, and you can choose which year you prefer. if the zodiacs were changed, then the manga does indeed take place in 2014! nice catch!

this post started as more timeline stuff but took a sharp left into shou-land

the math all checks out, and intuitively it’s obvious shou is twelve, but only if you know his birthday. which for most of the run, we didn’t. so the realization that he is twelve is fighting against fandom inertia

basically: how old anyone is entirely depends on when you think the events of the story happen (within reason)

[siyu-prow-blog]

Entrie 1

 Word Count: 1232

I’ve always thought success is something that isn’t fixed, different people have their own opinions on it. There are many different factors that actually affect it. For this essay, I am going to talk about EXO, a 9-member boy group from South Korea. They are from the company S.M entertainment.

 What got them ‘successful’ can be a lot of things, not only just music since the industry serves a lot more than just pure music. To me, their success comes from their recognition and how far they have come. They were initially debuted with twelve members, separated into Exo-K and Exo-M. They performed music in Korean and Mandarin respectively, promoting them in two different countries from the start of their career.

 When they first debuted back in 2012, they were given a title, ‘S.M’s biggest disappointment’ and were told to disband by the K-netizens. Though they started to receive commercial success in 2013, after receiving their first music show win.

 Since there are 9 members in the group, they all have different people they look up to. Though most of them look up to their seniors in the same company, namely Super Junior, TVXQ, BoA and Shinhwa. They themselves also have many other people they look up to, artists like Micheal Jackson, Babyface, Whitney Houston and Usher. Western artists had had a lot of influence over the entire globe ever since the past so it isn’t a surprise to see Eastern artists looking up to them.

 Two of the members of Exo, namely Kai and Chanyeol actually got some influences from films. Kai was a dancer even before being in S.M, he did Jazz but after watching The Nutcracker, he began to train in ballet. His father actually promised him a Nintendo if he joined the company contest so he participated in the S.M Youth Best Contest in 2007 at 13 years old. He won and he signed with the company and he began training in hip-hop.

 Chanyeol got interested in music after he watched School of Rock in elementary school and he started playing the drums. Then, after listening to Yoo Young Jin he wanted to be a singer though he focused on rapping while training under S.M.

 Groups like H.O.T and S.E.S were pretty popular during the late 1990s in South Korea and it may have formed a sort of ‘base’ for both S.M Ent. Later in the 2000s, artists like BoA and TVXQ already had an audience to perform for in a sense because the previous groups paved the way. Though they didn’t immediately get famous because no one ever does. Fans have to evaluate the new artists before they decide whether they want to like them or not.

 Groups like Super Junior and TVXQ, the ones that Exo look up to. They themselves received a lot of the public’s attention. Their performances wowing crowds, being titled the Kings of their generation. They had steady fanbases as well, being the center of the Korean Wave.

Back to 2012 when Exo-K and Exo-M just debuted, they were actually hyped up by their company. Though, I guess you can say that they didn’t do good enough for an S.M group since the seniors before them like Super Junior and SHINee, they did better when they first debuted. So in a sense, they flopped. Fans speculate that it was because after they released ‘MAMA’ their debut track, they didn’t release anything else for over a year and Exo-K didn’t promote their songs either, they basically went on hiatus after their debut. Which made the public think that S.M is going to disband the group.

 Even after they got their first music show win with ‘Wolf’ as 12 members in 2013, netizens left many ‘horrible’ comments.

For example,

[+920, -117] I bet they were thinking this is unbelievable as well... Who the hell would think that such a trashy song could win. I'd get on my knees and sob over how unjustified the win is. 

[+1,223, -48] Who?

 [+627, -23] Debuting under SM used to guarantee that you at least some public recognition but I guess that isn't the case anymore. Who are they?

 Then we look at right now, in 2018. Exo have been named ‘the biggest boyband in the world’, ‘Kings of K-pop’ and ‘Nation’s Pick’  by media outlets. They got their 100th music show win on September 14 2017 with their song ‘Power’. They earned the title of “Quadruple million seller” with their fourth studio album reportedly reaching Korean sales of 1,592,792.

 On January 16 this year, ‘Power’ became the first K-pop song to play at The Dubai Fountain. In early February, it was announced Exo was going to perform at the closing ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang as representatives of K-pop, alongside CL. In March, the Korean Mint Corporation announced that they would create commemorative medals for them, honouring them for their contribution as representatives for K-pop. The nine medals were unveiled on 18 April at a ceremony.

 Ever since Exo’s breakthrough, they started to receive so much attention. Fans flocked in, talking about their dance, song and visuals. Their music is also ‘easier’ to show to new K-pop fans since they have a wide variety of musical styles. Exo wowed the audiences with their choreography and dance moves. Not to forget they have a huge Chinese fanbase because of the split up that they did. They are also great at everything, really versatile- they can sing, dance, act and they possess good variety show skills.

Fans also become attracted to them because of their personalities. Being an idol is basically putting their lives out there, being in variety shows and the interaction with fans would further help the fans understand them as human beings. So, you can say that fans that went to them for music stayed because of how they are like as human beings.

Fans stay loyal to them, continuously supporting them throughout the years. It’s like a sort of commitment. More and more fans come in to the fandom, getting attracted by the entire package that is them so it’s really not only about the music. Exo also inspires their fans to be better people, they have been heavily involved in charity ever since debut. Parts of their proceeds of some of their albums went into a campaign that aids musical education for children in Asia. Individually, they themselves also volunteer and donate to many organizations. Fansites as well, they organize fundraisers to raise amounts to donate to charity under the name of Exo. The fanbase is the most important for any idol and both respect each other. Without the fans, they wouldn’t come this far and without the idols, all the fans won’t be this happy.

When people judge K-pop fans for liking K-pop, it’s honestly really annoying or maybe it’s because I’m biased. It’s hard to actually say that you like K-pop because of the judgements that will follow, I’ve had a fairly bad encounter so yeah.

 Though, It’s truly overwhelming, this leap.  Some things remain the same, each one of Exo had a dream. The dream to sing, to stand on stage that was fuelled by someone else that had the same dream. Though they had a stroke of luck you can say. There really isn’t a fixed equation to success, just luck and hard work plus hard work.

 Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exo_(band)

http://kprofiles.com/exo-members-profile/

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-EXO-the-most-popular-group-among-kpop-fans-rather-than-other-groups

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-love-EXO-so-much

https://netizenbuzz.blogspot.sg/2013/06/exo-wins-1-on-music-bank.html

https://onehallyu.com/topic/339263-why-do-people-act-like-exo-started-from-the-bottom-when-they-had-a-huge-lead/page-2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BoA

http://kprofiles.com/shinhwa-members-profile/