#or talking about how they've managed to go to every major tour of an artist while other people have waited years for a tour to even come

[lonesplendour]

Missed out on two concerts next year because tickets are just ridiculous to get your hands on. The whole idea of pre-sales and people being given early access to tickets is just so ridiculously unfair to me, especially when a lot of times those pre-sale tickets are locked behind some kind of paid option beforehand i.e. you get access to pre-sales if you've signed up for or bought into something. It's also really shitty for some fans to buy up tickets for multiple shows across multiple locations too, I don't really care how big a fan you are, if you're lucky enough to gain tickets to one show of a performer you know is going to likely sell out, it's shitty to buy up tickets for other shows on top of that. Tickets are already so overpriced and stupidly difficult to get your hands on, fans don't need to be worrying about other fans buying up all the tickets before they even get a chance at any. It's not cute when you boast about it either.

[therealvinelle]

How does Norway view it’s royal family I’m from Canada and lets just say that we are not big monarchy fans. But I wonder about other countries because commonwealth countries are kind of in a unique situation where their royalty is actually royalty of another country (Britain) and we just pay for it. (no seriously, we pay more for the monarchy in canada than the uk does)

I can't speak for everyone, but I personally am in favor of having a royal family and would find it disappointing and a change for the worse if we became a republic.

The monarchy in Norway came about the right way, when the country became independent in 1905 the people voted with an overwhelming majority in favor of getting the Danish prince Carl to become our king. It was in order words not something imposed upon us by a thousand years of feudalism, but a newly independent people's choice to have a king of our own.

King Haakon proceeded to, when Norway was occupied by the Germans, refuse to accept our government's formal request to disband (as they had been driven into exile and could no longer govern), as well as refuse to surrender. Did this lead to war, yes, but it also meant that through the war we remained an occupied country with a legitimate government overseas broadcasting to every citizen by radio that we could look towards in place of the occupying government imposed upon us.

After King Haakon there was King Olav, who took the bus during the 1973 energy crisis so as to lead by example, and went skiing in the woods like everybody else, he was an immensely popular king. Now there is King Harald, who married a commoner in Queen Sonja and whose children have made even more scandalous marriages (Princess Märtha married an artist and author, Ari Behn, while the crown prince Haakon married a single mother of a child out of wedlock who was and in certain circles remains viewed as very low class), but both Harald and Sonja are very loved. Harald famously is very witty, and more importantly he is a very inclusive and kind-hearted person who made it explicitly clear he is as much the king of immigrants and LGBT people as he is everybody else. He has also competed in the Olympics seveal times, we love an athlete.

The big eyesore is Princess Märtha, whose sins and scandals are money but in a nutshell, she made the choice to be financially independent (good!) only to then do so in the worst ways she could manage. There was the angel school, where you would go learn how to speak with angels (I once went to a party where we read her book and followed her instructions on finding your aura, great fun and I recommend this for a party game), which had everyone laughing at her, to the much less funny adventure she is now on, where she has... gone full Gwyneth Paltrow. As in, she is engaged to a shaman who says children with cancer must have wished the cancer upon themselves and he will also cleanse women's vaginas of evil if they've had too much sex, and she has toured the country with this man using her princess title (The tour was called "The princess and the shaman") which... yes. When they are criticized, they say it's racism because he is black, this has not endeared them to many either.

She can live her life how she wishes, the fact that what she wishes is to give a platform to a man who talks about being a lizard who contains ancient spirits and also the 5G net is bad is what makes people upset and lose respect for the monarchy as a whole.

Personally, I remain in favor of the monarchy because she'll never be on the throne, she is already irrelevant in every way that matters. The relevant royals we do have do their jobs well and responsibly, which is where my wanting to have a monarchy in the first place comes in: I believe in the constitutional monarchy as we practice it in Norway.

The people who make the decisions will be elected by the people, but the person representing the country, whose job is only to represent and better the country through charities and strengthened diplomatic ties, has an advantage if he isn't political and gains a continuity from not being replaced every time he loses the election cycle. In these times of rising populism I think the advantage to having an apolitical head of state and military is even greater. We could in theory vote a populist party into power but we wouldn't have a populist president, the way certain countries experienced not too long ago and stand to do now. As for how one should go about finding such a non-political, continuous leader of the country, I think inheriting the position is as good a way as any to keep the transferrance of power from one sovereign to the next from getting political. In other words, monarchy but keep it constitutional.

(I'm also colored by how King Haakon handled the occupation, as well as how the King of Spain as recently as in 1981 prevented a military coup in Spain by denouncing the military's actions. How relevant these events are to the present day can be debated, but I think the past couple of years have proven that we should not take the status quo for granted and our democracies can come under threat. When they do, I prefer to have every safeguard imaginable in place for them. If that safeguard spend their time promoting art and charity that's just a big bonus.)

[discluded]

KinnPorsche is my first view into BL fandom. Every time BOC announces something the comments from many fans are all about what they want instead and how the announcement is bad for the artists they have. Wtf? This level of entitlement from fans who have no insight into the actual business or plans is so disheartening. Is this normal? Like they announced a tour date for HK and people are like why another tour date, we need a series, we need the artist to be actors etc. Do they think making a series costs nothing? Do they not recall we got 14 WHOLE amazing episodes? It all breaks my heart.

Hey, I don't usually talk about fandom drama but sure I'll bite since time it's about business and I guess there's going to be new people coming in once in a while (hopefully!) wondering about why the fandom is so messed up.

Anyone who doesn't want to hear about the merry-go-round of drama from the last 6 months, should probably bow out.

So it's a bit of a multi-fold problem.

(1) You're right about the entitlement, but part of it is because many fans are coming from a background of engagement set by kpop where there is so much contentification of the idols' lives and their work schedule is really unsustainable and harmful.

Fans will hear that and go "boohoo the company is abusing them!" and then turn around and demand an insane level of content/access and not put two and two together... In fact, some fans named kpop agencies as better talent management companies when they headed to KPWT Seoul like many of those agencies aren't notorious for working their idols/trainees to the bone. It's inheriting a set of expectations from a toxic industry where the core content also is smaller/more bite size (songs vs. whole series).

(2) BOC is an extremely young company and are facing growing pains. Some things they've done from the KPWT promotion and talent management side are genuine missteps that need to be corrected. For example, they announced a KPWT date in Vietnam and then later had to cancel the date after it was apparent the scheduling was too tight. In the cancelation of the date, they also misspelt the name of the city (HCMC), which was named after a revered leader in Vietnam. Fans had already started booking travel/hotels around that date so it was already a cause of inconvenience and fans felt even more upset because BOC refused to apologize for the misspelling. Some of it now is genuinely fans being overreactive, but a not-small part is friction that was built up from missteps BOC made earlier, and thus is now leading to fans feeling sensitive whenever they feel that they are being slighted.

A lot of fans already decided they dislike BOC so there's no incremental improvement BOC can make at this point to win them back. But there genuinely was a lack of comms/PR leadership and planning by the company in the middle of this year.

Somewhere in the middle of these two - fans feeling like BOC does not take care of their artists and the lack of socmed/PR/comms leadership is the Daemi problem. feel free to search "kinnporsche daemi" on YouTube to learn about that. I know at least one person made an explainer video and I'm not also interested in talking about it.

(3) BOC is also competing within the Thai BL industry with GMMTV, which produces the majority of BLs that air in Thailand. Again, this is a problem of expectation setting. GMMTV is a well-oiled machine that consistently turns out bad to mediocre to acceptable products like clockwork. BOC served a single Michellin-star quality feast, but fans are looking at GMMTV and going "They're going to McD's five times a week" as though those two experiences are comparable.

(And a horrible machine in some ways -- it was recently exposed that an assistant director was using his powers to predate and he was arrested so like, fans really need to ... not hold GMMTV as the standard).

I'm not saying fans' expectations are valid. They are not. But a lot off fans were on BOC's side during the airing KPTS and had been rooting for them, and there is an explanation for why some fans now have unfavorable feelings towards them. The fact that they dug their heels in and refused to apologize / openly acknowledge improvements are needed when they made obvious missteps made a lot of people who generally feel neutral about them like myself not that inclined to stand up for them in other instances. Combined with toxic industry standards coming from other fandom (kpop) and industry (Thai BL) angles, it's not really surprising to me that this is where we got to.