#i shouldnt be allowed to post before 10am

[pokemon-personalities]

i’m trying really hard to get in the habit of telling people when something they do or say makes me feel overwhelmingly positive or happy... i really means a lot to me to be able to express a positive emotional response to another person without shame. i really want to be able to spread good and happy feelings to anyone whenever possible. i think it’s made me a lot more appreciative of others, and i think it’s a really good thing to try even just once to see how it makes you feel and how it makes others feel!!

[ionqins]

170525 EXO’rDIUM in NY/NJ fan account

tl;dr: don’t camp out if you want to enjoy the concert.

before i jump into the actual concert day, here’s a summary of the announcement and ticketing extravaganza.

so mymusictaste (mmt) officially announced exo’s “north american” tour in ny and la on feb 9. they also announced that “makers” got to buy their tickets during the presale before the general public and also get 10% off their ticket (1 ticket per maker). “makers” are people who had gone onto mmt’s official site before ~9pm feb 9 (up until about one hour after mmt posted their announcement), made a (free) account, and clicked on the “make” button for exo in ny 2017. 

immediately, there was an uproar from fans- on how the whole makers getting a presale is unfair, on how soon the tickets are going on sale, and on how exo isnt going to nearly as many stops as last year. atlanta fans were especially upset because their city had one of the highest “makers” from last year - which was supposedly what mmt uses to decide which cities to hold concerts in - and mmt skipped atlanta both last year and this year. mmt, of course, stayed mute to all the complaints thrown at them, as they always do.

fast-forward to ticket presale day. my sister and i were ready with our 7 devices on ticketmaster, waiting for a bloodbath and not taking any chances, seeing our exo ticketing experience last year- standing ga ended up being ordered by ticketing number rather than fcfs, something mmt didnt clarify until after the sales. this year, the entire presale ended up being anti-climatic. fans found (supposedly from mmt’s site) that about ~3k fans were “makers” but it seemed like barely a few hundred made any dent on the presales. ga was wide open and the only really popular sections were the closest seated rows.

a few days later, the general sales opened up and the ~10k venue ended up selling about half the seats, a number that didnt really increase drastically after the first day of sales.

and fans blamed the poor ticket sales on mmt’s lack of promotion (but they promoted the same way as they did for last year’s sold-out show) or the concert being on a weekday (but so was bts’s sold out show a month prior) or expensive tix for no fan interaction (again, last year’s show had the same situation) or the presales discouraging non-makers to buy tix (but they literally had to take 30sec and navigate to the ticketing page to realize that presales barely did anything) or exo not going to as many stops as last year (i truly don’t understand how this is an excuse for lack of sales- shouldnt fewer stops mean more packed venues for the existing stops? specifically, northeast coast fans wouldve still had prudential center to fill up).

the real reasons for low sales were: 1- exo’s decreasing popularity in the US- it’s embarassing to see how exo fans refuse to see this fact. fandoms rise and fall, it’s the circle of life and there’s nothing to be ashamed of. exo may have been one of the more popular - if not the most popular - kpop concert act (i say this instead of simply “kpop act” because big bang is still the most popular household name) in the states, but there’s a new lion in town.

2- speaking of lions, bts’s tickets went on sale long before exo’s was, and most fans are younger and wouldnt be able to afford two concerts within a month of each other. but going back to point 1, im gonna go out on a limb here and say that even if these announcements/concerts were chronologically flipped, bts still would have sold out, just as they sold out every single other venue in their entire wings tour. and exo would still have a visible number of emptiness in their concert. the amount of negativity (“exo will never come to the states again”, “american exo fans are terrible”, telling fans to give their tickets away for free if they can’t make it - this was the biggest wtf moment i had during the ticketing experience. how about /you/ buy a $200 ticket and donate it to a fan?) leading up to the concert was appalling. i wish american exo fans start taking these experiences on a positive note and enjoy everything to the fullest while it lasts, instead of acting whiny and immature and blaming the organizers for the fandom’s own lackings. onto the actual concert experience. both my sister and i worked until regular hours the day before the concert, so we left home at around 7pm and drove up to the venue close to 11pm. the line was already at least 15+ tents and about 100 people from what we could see. i dropped my sister off with her sleeping bag and parked/checked in at the hotel we were staying at about a 10 minutes-walk away. i walked back to the venue (definitely sketchy neighborhood, would not rec to walk alone at night if you dont want to be cat-called). i brought a duffle bag and smuggled out a hotel pillow and towel, along with some food, water, a portable charger, and two umbrellas. it was only somewhat chilly (lows of 50s) but the rainy weather forecast was what worried us the most. i camped out for a few hours and then walked back to the hotel around 2am (again, would not rec) since i hadnt bought a sleeping bag and the cold was getting to me. i slept until 4am and then checked on the sis, and then slept again until 7:30am. /aside/ i was supposed to wake up at 6am and switch places with my sister but my phone alarm apparently doesnt go off when it’s in the ultimate power save mode, aka i was a terrible person and had my sister waiting for over an hour out in the cold and rain /end aside/ it had been constantly drizzling all night, with some wind to add to the chill. i took some hotel breakfast to-go and walked back to the venue to see everyone’s pale and lifeless faces. the number of people in front of us had doubled to about 200 overnight so that was just excellent. my sister looked like a wreck so i sent her back to the hotel to get some actual shut-eye while i held the fort. mmt had said they’ll start wristbanding the ga line at 10am, to create a numerical order for when we go in. so my sister comes back at 9:30am and we wait. and wait. and enjoy the torrential downpour of rain that nj so graciously gave us. around 11am some staff comes out and tells us they wont be wristbanding until 1:30pm. so then my sister goes back to the hotel, hoping she could sleep this time. shortly after 12, another staff member comes out and tells us they’ll start wristbanding soon so get your tickets ready. panicking, i call my sister half a dozen times and finally get a sleepy response. she runs back just in time to witness the mess mmt will create with this wristbanding process. now logically, mmt staff should have gone down the line of campers and given out these numerical wristbands in the order that we had already put ourselves in. but did they? of course not, why would mmt ever be logical? so some staff up at the very front of the line yelled for us to stand up and make /another line/ in front of them, about 5 feet away from our original line. as expected, an absolute stampede of fans followed. fans who were behind us ran up in front of us, and fans who were originally in front of us were no longer there if they had temporarily left the line right before for a bathroom or coffee break. the “line” we had made wasn’t exactly a line, either, but more of a hoarde. in my haste i had forgotten my phone at our camping site, but my sister was nice enough to go back and get it while i held our place in this new standing line (my phone was undamaged but our sleeping bag and most of our food was crushed). so mmt made us wait standing in this new line for another hour before they actually began coming down and putting our wristbands on. they then told us that we can leave this line if we want but that putting ourselves in order again will ultimately be up to us and that they “won’t be held accountable” if people cut us or if we can’t get back in the same order. so literally :) what is the point :) of this new line and the wristbands then :) the merch line was supposed to open up at 1pm but since nothing ever happens on time with mmt, we should’ve known. i stood in the wristband line while my sister went to the other side where the merch line was. she comes back around 3:30pm with the lightstick. then i decide to go back to the hotel to drop off our remaining stuff so we could go into the pit with no bags. i also leave our umbrellas, which later turned out to be a mistake. at 4pm i get a text saying that mmt decided us standing in line wasnt enough, they wanted to barricade us so we’d feel like canned fish. the wind is howling by this time, and the temperatures had dropped to what it was the night before. it also started raining again. i walk back and was allowed to jump the barricade once one of the fans we were standing with yelled “sister!” these were the fans who were in line since the night before (with a sprinkling of fans who cut in line earlier that morning), so they meant business when someone requested to get back in line. so here we stand, squished like sardines as the weather gets more chilly and windy. and then it begins to rain, of course. i had left our umbrellas at the hotel so we wouldnt have to carry anything into the pit but that was a grave mistake. we all tried to huddle under the nearest umbrella that we could, but the winds blew the rain every which way so nearly everyone was soaked in the end. someone behind us was nice enough to give us plastic trash bags, which we made holes into to wear like ponchos. it was 5pm, then 6pm, when we could see staff inside spreading out carpets and then standing around. then 6:30 came, one hour before the concert and supposedly the time when doors open. but open they did not. after a few people called the venue, we were notified that there was “production issues” so we won’t be let in until 7pm. some assumed there was a previous event for which they had to clean up, others thought there was something wrong with exo’s stage, itself. many of us, including me, were shivering non-stop by this point. but we didnt have any other choice but to wait. 7pm comes by, and the doors were still shut and the staff inside still in their place. more phone calls later and again we learn that opening the doors is delayed by another half hour to 7:30. aka when the concert should have begun. between 7 and when they finally let us in at around 7:45, there were at least four people who either fainted or had panic attacks and had to be ushered inside (after fans had to continuously bang the windows to get the staff’s attention- and no, we weren’t just impatient to get let in so please come outside smh). 7:45 and we’re inside. i’m still wet and shivering and too cold to take off my jacket and put it over the railing as i had planned. my friend was near the back of the ga line and she barely made it in when the concert began at 8:25, one hour after the advertised time. the concert was a blur, to be honest. this has to be the first time i yawned during a concert, and that, too, several times. most of the fans around me were equally tired. i had gone to the exoluxion concert at the same venue a year prior, and the difference in energy was striking. (with exoluxion, mmt had us lined up by ticket number so there was no camping out needed, no bad weather, and no one-hour delay). exo was fantastic, and despite their jetlag they were giving it their all. they made a few funny mistakes here and there but they just laughed it off and continued. the remixed versions of their older songs were very neat and i loved the upgraded pyrotechnics this year. i stood near the side of the stage where kai (ofc), chen, kyungsoo, and suho showed up the most. not to be biased but kai actually stole the show. being his usual self he gave each dance move his 110% and his smiles were absolute killer. his hair was also glorious, good goly what a mane. overall i did enjoy the concert. exo themselves put out a wonderful show, and sme provided a beautiful stage to watch the glory in. i just wish i had been awake to appreciate the boys more after waiting to see them for so long.