#i remember at the time when it this came out it was shinhwa's 15th anniversary i think?

[gaykey]

this song 👌🏽👌🏽👌🏽

[muselin]

Yeah lol I ain't putting this in the tags, it won't fit.

One day in 2009, I was having a normal day. Nothing was even going on, I was just browsing YouTube listening to Japanese pop as I had been recently. And YouTube recommended Super Junior's Sorry Sorry. I clicked and watched and listened to it and I was infected. It didn't matter that I hadn't heard of kpop and didn't know the language. I don't know if I then searched something or YouTube just recommended it, but the next one I saw was SHINee's Ring Dong Dong.

Kpop had what Jpop lacked to truly get me hooked, and that was the amazing dance and performance aspect. I stanned SHINee and Super Junior for a good year probably, and my first bias was Kyuhyun from Super Junior. I remember I never picked a bias from SHINee, it was always someone new after a couple of weeks.

I was still in school and no one else listened to any foreign music around me so I fell out of the fandom for a long time. Until 2017, when BTS started to really get famous overseas. For a few months I was actively avoiding it, even though I would see articles about them everywhere. Then I finally said, okay. Let's see what they're about. I just searched up their name and DNA was their most recent comeback.

I watched it and initially I was conflicted. Kpop had changed a lot since I was into it, I thought. The makeup, the clothes, the styling, everything. I was on the fence about BTS but I did like the song. So I thought let's see what else they put out. I started diving through their discography and never came out. Jimin became my first hard-core bias. I loved everything about him- his talent, his performance, his look, his personality, everything. I stanned only BTS for 2 years, until 2019 when i went to see them at Wembley on their world tour. And I was so close to the stage I could see them so clearly, it felt surreal after only seeing them through a screen for 2 years. That concert was the best one I've ever been to in my whole life. Also the last one I went to before COVID.

After that my emotional attachment to BTS started to fade a little, after Fake Love. Musically I didn't enjoy their stuff as much after that and I was starting to notice other groups finally. Monsta X came first and I stanned them for a long time, until Wonho left the group. He'd been my bias and while i continued listening to Monsta X's music, things just felt incomplete. I found VIXX then.

There was another reason I came back into kpop. In 2017 it was also the time around Christmas when Jonghyun passed away. I couldn't believe that my old group who I first loved in 2009 was going through something like this. Alongside other things, I fell back into Super Junior and SHINee to have a look at what they'd been doing. SHINee were inactive for a while the hyungs were in the military and I mainly listened to Taemin as a soloist and I fell in LOVE with him. He was so different from what I remembered, his enormous talent had been fully developed and he had matured, and he inevitably became my SHINee bias. I rediscovered Super Junior too but was so sad to find out that Sorry Sorry was the last song the group did as the original 13, and since then 4 members had departed. But their newer music was so good, I found it easier to cope with after seeing how happy they were to still be together.

I celebrated Super Junior's 15th anniversary in 2020, as well as my 10-year history of being a kpop fan. I retraced everything I had missed, the transitions from 2nd gen when i started, to 3rd gen where BTS were Kings, to 4th gen when the scene exploded and there were so many new groups. So many new styles and music as well. TXT have grabbed me now with their more mature sound, and Stray Kids. I love a few girls groups as well (3rd and 4th gen). I listen almost exclusively to kpop most of the time. I listen to Shinhwa as well and I am proud to be a fan of the oldest kpop group who are still active, and also a 1st gen group. My favourites span all the generations.

Hi! I am Muselin, an 11+ year veteran kpop fan.

Reblog and put in the tags how you got into kpop