my journey through fandoms (pt. 1)
Oct. 11th, 2025 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sseungsi think it's common for a gen z to have relied so much on the internet from an early age when it comes to discovering media, making connections, new friends, figuring out your own identity, and so on. of course, i'm not an exception, so it's not a lie or an exaggeration to say i've been into a lot of different fandoms for over half of my life. fandom spaces have always taken an important role in my life, so i've decided to make an extensive and overly detailed timeline of all the fandoms i've been in. maybe that way people can get to know me a little better, or understand the way i consume media nowadays.
warning: long, long text ahead.
☆ 2010-2012:
like any other person who happens to be a younger sibling, i fell into the trap of following my older sister's steps: spending literal hours watching mtv. this is how i found out about the first band i got interested in without anyone else introducing them to me beforehand, mcfly. i was around ten years old (yes, ten. i guess a lot of us are also victims of unsupervised internet access from an early age), and yet there i was, looking for facebook groups to join so i could talk about how much i liked danny jones after listening to falling in love on the tv.
i did find the groups, and i did talk about mcfly with a couple of girls who were around my age. but since they were maybe around two years older than me, they knew a tiny bit more about the internet than i did. so, sooner than later i found myself making a tumblr account.
i followed their blogs, and since i was young and i didn't know much english other than what google translate would allow me to understand, i searched for accounts that posted in spanish and were into other artists i also liked (popstars from disney, mostly), back when tumblr's search engine wasn't total ass like it's been for a couple of years now lol… anyways, those accounts were into different artists too, so soon enough i found myself coming across a gifset of one of the boybands you could definitely not escape if you were on tumblr during 2010-2011: one direction.
i have this very vivid memory of the gifset being from the x factor live tour video diary (or just something related to that tour). i got so curious about it, i found myself frantically searching up who they were, what they did, and immediately becoming their fan before what makes you beautiful even came out. i'm sure one of the first things i reblogged that was related to them was another gifset from their pokemon diaries too. i have no idea why they deleted those from their verified youtube channel, but just to confirm my memory isn't wrong, i googled it and found this entry dated april 4th, 2011. also, side note: i would attach screenshots from my old tumblr as proof for all of these, but sadly when i got into kpop i deleted everything non-kpop related from it. i still regret it to this day...
i was now a directioner, and you guessed it right! this is also when i started ''officially'' shipping people. to keep things brief(as if i ever made a brief post about anything at all), i knew what yaoi was before all of this, all thanks to my dad's ex-girlfriend's daughter, who was a year older than me and was a death note fan. she liked lxlight and mattxmello (she liked a bunch of ships from different animes actually, but death note was her favorite) so she is the one who introduced me to yaoi somehow (i caught my older sister reading tokio hotel fanfiction when i was like three years younger than this, to be honest, but i didn't undertand it back then though, so i only realized what she was doing years later). shipping people was common and normal within fandom spaces, even if you weren't into the whole anime/yaoi genre per se, and they didn't call you crazy or a fucking freak if you thought or publicly said dougie poynter and harry judd were making out backstage sometimes. it was fun! it still is! so, having that and the fact that i was a louis girl in mind, it was pretty much inevitable for me to fall into the rabbit hole that was the worldwide known 1d ship: larry stylinson.
yes guys, i was a larrie too! at eleven years old at that. you can tell i've never been normal about any of my fandom experiences already and you're only reading about the beginning of it. being a larrie added a different kind of thrill to the whole directioner experience when you look back. it was getting fueled by the boys themselves and everybody thought it was something real! everybody was enjoying it and having fun! (fast forward to them not working out, louis being petty and getting angry at their shippers, them never talking normally ever again, yadda yadda... but i wasn't in the fandom anymore when all that happened so... not my circus, not my monkeys!)
but anyways, back to the fandom journey: putting aside that i was also active on tumblr now, facebook was probably at it's peak during that time, so i was definitely still using it. and like i said, i was a member of different facebook groups that were used for fandom talk, and now that 1d were actually releasing music it was much easier to find different ones with people from latam who were searching for directioner friends too. we were all kids and teens, and the internet was still fairly new to all of us, so you ended up talking to pretty much anyone who had your same taste. it was easy to make friends online, so i made my own share of them, and since there were so many people being active in those groups we ended up making our very own too. we were probably around fifteen to twenty people in there, all from different countries from latin america, sharing our thoughts, our takes, our taste.
still, i was a kid, and it was my last year of elementary school. we had a school trip at the beginning of november (school starts in march and ends in december here. southern hemisphere things) to celebrate we were graduating. i remember we all had to leave around four in the morning, so what do you do when you're almost a teen and you have to be up early to get dropped at school to take a bus with your classmates to another province? you pull your first all-nighter and spend time browsing youtube on your laptop (yes, i had my own laptop at eleven, this is how i got away with doing so many of these things on the internet, in case you were wondering...) while hoping your mom doesn't find out you're still up. and what do you come across on youtube's homepage? no other than the boys by girls' generation. and you get so obsessed with it you of course need to find out who those girls are! but you can't, because you won't be home for the next two days, and when you're a kid two days feel like an eternity.
i honestly don't remember how it happened, considering how many steps there were for you to get to do that, but i know later on i had a couple of girls' generation's songs (the boys, gee, oh!) downloaded on my nokia 5300. i do know though, that i forgot about them pretty quickly, i was still a directioner too after all, and up all night came out shortly after that.
i got very close with the people on the facebook group i mentioned. we talked daily as 1d was very active during the time, and we also shared everything else we were into: some of them were into lady gaga, others liked the hunger games, lana del rey, marina & the diamonds, you name it. every 2012-esque thing you can think of right now, thirteen years later, was contained in a facebook group ruled by teens who were also on tumblr at the same time. it was peak. and funnily enough, two of my friends from said group were also into *drumrolls* kpop! they used to talk a lot about 2ne1 and snsd back then. of couse, i knew nothing about kpop, so i had no idea who 2ne1 or snsd were. or at least that's what i thought, until one day i got curious and asked about them. my friends sent me some youtube links, and soon enough i was like wait, i know this, i know them. so i let my friends know about it, and they took the chance to send even more stuff my way. that's how i officially got introduced to kpop.
it was late 2012 now, one direction released take me home and i liked it. the thing is i didn't love it, you know? so what's the problem here? you're probably asking. well, after being formally introduced to kpop i took matters into my own hands and took the time to investigate. i deep-dived into girls' generation's music and quickly fell in love with them, learned their names and a couple of facts about them too. but i also found myself on sm entertainment's youtube channel, which is how i found a bunch of other groups like shinee and f(x), but most importantly: exo, who had only debuted six months before that. there wasn't almost anything other than a couple of mvs from their mini album, so i remember i used to spend a ridiculous amount of time watching their debut teasers, you had to work with what you had.
ok, you're probably still not seeing the problem, right? well, the truth is there isn't one. but also, when you're a dramatic teen on the internet and you don't like your favorite group's new album and you're secretly getting into the groups your online friends stan without them knowing anything about it it is a problem. because what if they think you're a bad 1d fan? what if they think you're trying to copy them? what if a million other things happen? well, fun fact: none of that ended up happening. they were actually very happy to share fandom knowledge with me, and encouraged me to check even more groups out, because back then it was pretty much the standard procedure to be multifandom if you were into kpop(thanks for ruining a big portion of that @ undisclosed fandom).
so, back to one direction. it turned out that my friends weren't totally convinced about their take me home album either, so we spent around two months being like ''okay! it's not the end of the world! better things will come out later!'' only for them to release the music video for kiss you at the beginning of january, and that's when we all (well, not all of us, just the ones who were into kpop) collectively said yeah this isn't it. so… my directioner era ended there, pretty drastically and early in their career, and as a consequence a baby exo-l was born around october and december 2012.
☆ 2013:
i was officially into kpop now. the transition from one fandom to another was probably (because i don't remember it that clearly) very smooth, considering how i was now on summer break (here where i live summer break is from december to march) and i had all the time in the world to get fully immersed in the insanity that was exo's lore. and i also happened to be lucky enough to join the fandom during the time they weren't promoting and just attending festivals, end of the year award shows, and nothing much other than that. catching up with their content was fairly easy thanks to fansub teams (r.i.p) too, so there was no denial my days as a 1d fan were buried in a casket now. another fun fact: i remember one of the first things that confirmed i was no longer a directioner was not caring about zayn's birthday but still talking about kyungsoo's with my friends instead (they share birthdays for those who aren't aware lol).
in addition to being an exo-l and being there for their first comeback with wolf and their rise to stardom with growl, i got interested in a lot of other groups who were also releasing some of their legendary comebacks around that time too. including those groups i mentioned before, like girls' generation releasing i got a boy, shinee's dream girl with their the misconceptions of [...] album trilogy, f(x)'s rum pum pum pum and their amazing album pink tape (i even bought a copy of it back then!), there were also groups i liked such as kara, afterschool, infinite, t-ara, girls' day, b.a.p, vixx, and so many more...maybe i should add making a top with my favorite songs from these years to my list of ideas for this blog...?
there was no doubt kpop was taking over a majority of my interests. i couldn't help it since there were so many groups and soloists for me to pick and choose from, but it wasn't the only thing i was into. one of the media i got into back then was of course, like many other kpop fans, anime. i watched a couple of them, but the one that stuck with me was no other than free! and i have to say, i wasn't a full-on otaku, but i did consume a bunch of yaoi (which was quite bad, by the way, no bl mangaka seemed to know what consent was. i don't know what it's like nowadays) like junjō romantica too, just to confirm i was a teen who got easily baited by homoeroticism. i am still the same even twelve years later as a fully grown adult. you know that thing they always say about whatever fandom you were in at thirteen being the one you'll stick to for the rest of your life? it's true, and i can confirm it!
and i was lucky enough to have an irl best friend who happened to be into all of these things too, so even when i wasn't online i still had someone to talk about all of this stuff at school. i remeber this one time i got into the building saying ''you need to watch this now!'' and shoving my phone all up my best friend's face with history by exo-m playing like it wasn't seven in the morning. thanks to her i never had to keep my interests to myself while growing up, even if i was already part of active facebook communities. so i guess that's a big part of the reason why i've never been embarrassed about people knowing what i like, or why i've never paid much attention to speaking my mind online. it's part of who i am, of what i like, of what brings me joy, so i never thought of it as something that i needed to hide from the world.
i will keep it up to here for now, considering how long this got. i still have many, many things to list and go into detail, but i will save it for maybe two other posts! also: i mentioned attaching proof somewhere in the post, so maybe i'll edit this later and add screenshots of what i do have from back then! so maybe consider coming back to this in a couple of days to check if i actually did, or if it just stayed as an idea lol!
thank you for reading, if you did, i hope it was enjoyable enough!
- meowie <3
warning: long, long text ahead.
☆ 2010-2012:
like any other person who happens to be a younger sibling, i fell into the trap of following my older sister's steps: spending literal hours watching mtv. this is how i found out about the first band i got interested in without anyone else introducing them to me beforehand, mcfly. i was around ten years old (yes, ten. i guess a lot of us are also victims of unsupervised internet access from an early age), and yet there i was, looking for facebook groups to join so i could talk about how much i liked danny jones after listening to falling in love on the tv.
i did find the groups, and i did talk about mcfly with a couple of girls who were around my age. but since they were maybe around two years older than me, they knew a tiny bit more about the internet than i did. so, sooner than later i found myself making a tumblr account.
i followed their blogs, and since i was young and i didn't know much english other than what google translate would allow me to understand, i searched for accounts that posted in spanish and were into other artists i also liked (popstars from disney, mostly), back when tumblr's search engine wasn't total ass like it's been for a couple of years now lol… anyways, those accounts were into different artists too, so soon enough i found myself coming across a gifset of one of the boybands you could definitely not escape if you were on tumblr during 2010-2011: one direction.
i have this very vivid memory of the gifset being from the x factor live tour video diary (or just something related to that tour). i got so curious about it, i found myself frantically searching up who they were, what they did, and immediately becoming their fan before what makes you beautiful even came out. i'm sure one of the first things i reblogged that was related to them was another gifset from their pokemon diaries too. i have no idea why they deleted those from their verified youtube channel, but just to confirm my memory isn't wrong, i googled it and found this entry dated april 4th, 2011. also, side note: i would attach screenshots from my old tumblr as proof for all of these, but sadly when i got into kpop i deleted everything non-kpop related from it. i still regret it to this day...
i was now a directioner, and you guessed it right! this is also when i started ''officially'' shipping people. to keep things brief
yes guys, i was a larrie too! at eleven years old at that. you can tell i've never been normal about any of my fandom experiences already and you're only reading about the beginning of it. being a larrie added a different kind of thrill to the whole directioner experience when you look back. it was getting fueled by the boys themselves and everybody thought it was something real! everybody was enjoying it and having fun! (fast forward to them not working out, louis being petty and getting angry at their shippers, them never talking normally ever again, yadda yadda... but i wasn't in the fandom anymore when all that happened so... not my circus, not my monkeys!)
but anyways, back to the fandom journey: putting aside that i was also active on tumblr now, facebook was probably at it's peak during that time, so i was definitely still using it. and like i said, i was a member of different facebook groups that were used for fandom talk, and now that 1d were actually releasing music it was much easier to find different ones with people from latam who were searching for directioner friends too. we were all kids and teens, and the internet was still fairly new to all of us, so you ended up talking to pretty much anyone who had your same taste. it was easy to make friends online, so i made my own share of them, and since there were so many people being active in those groups we ended up making our very own too. we were probably around fifteen to twenty people in there, all from different countries from latin america, sharing our thoughts, our takes, our taste.
still, i was a kid, and it was my last year of elementary school. we had a school trip at the beginning of november (school starts in march and ends in december here. southern hemisphere things) to celebrate we were graduating. i remember we all had to leave around four in the morning, so what do you do when you're almost a teen and you have to be up early to get dropped at school to take a bus with your classmates to another province? you pull your first all-nighter and spend time browsing youtube on your laptop (yes, i had my own laptop at eleven, this is how i got away with doing so many of these things on the internet, in case you were wondering...) while hoping your mom doesn't find out you're still up. and what do you come across on youtube's homepage? no other than the boys by girls' generation. and you get so obsessed with it you of course need to find out who those girls are! but you can't, because you won't be home for the next two days, and when you're a kid two days feel like an eternity.
i honestly don't remember how it happened, considering how many steps there were for you to get to do that, but i know later on i had a couple of girls' generation's songs (the boys, gee, oh!) downloaded on my nokia 5300. i do know though, that i forgot about them pretty quickly, i was still a directioner too after all, and up all night came out shortly after that.
☆
☆ 2012-2013:i got very close with the people on the facebook group i mentioned. we talked daily as 1d was very active during the time, and we also shared everything else we were into: some of them were into lady gaga, others liked the hunger games, lana del rey, marina & the diamonds, you name it. every 2012-esque thing you can think of right now, thirteen years later, was contained in a facebook group ruled by teens who were also on tumblr at the same time. it was peak. and funnily enough, two of my friends from said group were also into *drumrolls* kpop! they used to talk a lot about 2ne1 and snsd back then. of couse, i knew nothing about kpop, so i had no idea who 2ne1 or snsd were. or at least that's what i thought, until one day i got curious and asked about them. my friends sent me some youtube links, and soon enough i was like wait, i know this, i know them. so i let my friends know about it, and they took the chance to send even more stuff my way. that's how i officially got introduced to kpop.
it was late 2012 now, one direction released take me home and i liked it. the thing is i didn't love it, you know? so what's the problem here? you're probably asking. well, after being formally introduced to kpop i took matters into my own hands and took the time to investigate. i deep-dived into girls' generation's music and quickly fell in love with them, learned their names and a couple of facts about them too. but i also found myself on sm entertainment's youtube channel, which is how i found a bunch of other groups like shinee and f(x), but most importantly: exo, who had only debuted six months before that. there wasn't almost anything other than a couple of mvs from their mini album, so i remember i used to spend a ridiculous amount of time watching their debut teasers, you had to work with what you had.
ok, you're probably still not seeing the problem, right? well, the truth is there isn't one. but also, when you're a dramatic teen on the internet and you don't like your favorite group's new album and you're secretly getting into the groups your online friends stan without them knowing anything about it it is a problem. because what if they think you're a bad 1d fan? what if they think you're trying to copy them? what if a million other things happen? well, fun fact: none of that ended up happening. they were actually very happy to share fandom knowledge with me, and encouraged me to check even more groups out, because back then it was pretty much the standard procedure to be multifandom if you were into kpop
so, back to one direction. it turned out that my friends weren't totally convinced about their take me home album either, so we spent around two months being like ''okay! it's not the end of the world! better things will come out later!'' only for them to release the music video for kiss you at the beginning of january, and that's when we all (well, not all of us, just the ones who were into kpop) collectively said yeah this isn't it. so… my directioner era ended there, pretty drastically and early in their career, and as a consequence a baby exo-l was born around october and december 2012.
☆
☆ 2013:
i was officially into kpop now. the transition from one fandom to another was probably (because i don't remember it that clearly) very smooth, considering how i was now on summer break (here where i live summer break is from december to march) and i had all the time in the world to get fully immersed in the insanity that was exo's lore. and i also happened to be lucky enough to join the fandom during the time they weren't promoting and just attending festivals, end of the year award shows, and nothing much other than that. catching up with their content was fairly easy thanks to fansub teams (r.i.p) too, so there was no denial my days as a 1d fan were buried in a casket now. another fun fact: i remember one of the first things that confirmed i was no longer a directioner was not caring about zayn's birthday but still talking about kyungsoo's with my friends instead (they share birthdays for those who aren't aware lol).
in addition to being an exo-l and being there for their first comeback with wolf and their rise to stardom with growl, i got interested in a lot of other groups who were also releasing some of their legendary comebacks around that time too. including those groups i mentioned before, like girls' generation releasing i got a boy, shinee's dream girl with their the misconceptions of [...] album trilogy, f(x)'s rum pum pum pum and their amazing album pink tape (i even bought a copy of it back then!), there were also groups i liked such as kara, afterschool, infinite, t-ara, girls' day, b.a.p, vixx, and so many more...
and i was lucky enough to have an irl best friend who happened to be into all of these things too, so even when i wasn't online i still had someone to talk about all of this stuff at school. i remeber this one time i got into the building saying ''you need to watch this now!'' and shoving my phone all up my best friend's face with history by exo-m playing like it wasn't seven in the morning. thanks to her i never had to keep my interests to myself while growing up, even if i was already part of active facebook communities. so i guess that's a big part of the reason why i've never been embarrassed about people knowing what i like, or why i've never paid much attention to speaking my mind online. it's part of who i am, of what i like, of what brings me joy, so i never thought of it as something that i needed to hide from the world.
☆
i will keep it up to here for now, considering how long this got. i still have many, many things to list and go into detail, but i will save it for maybe two other posts! also: i mentioned attaching proof somewhere in the post, so maybe i'll edit this later and add screenshots of what i do have from back then! so maybe consider coming back to this in a couple of days to check if i actually did, or if it just stayed as an idea lol!
thank you for reading, if you did, i hope it was enjoyable enough!
- meowie <3
no subject
Date: 2025-10-12 07:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-12 10:06 am (UTC)thank you sm for reading sweet bun <3
no subject
Date: 2025-10-12 05:24 pm (UTC)anyways, i did have a resurgence of my old old 1D hyperfixation following liams death (i think this was me coping, i know 90% of those boys arent the greatest people but i still had a fondness for them left over from little me) and i got really into the larry thing. this actually all led to me and roomie M to mutually create google slides about 1D and txt to show each other and learn more about our respective bands lol. theres a whole chart on ship names, their popularity, my favorite ones, ect. lots of fun.
your discovery of kpop is an interesting read though! i was into anime (full on otaku bullshit) when i had gotten a phone around 11 and jpop/kpop kind of comes hand and hand with that but i was never interested enough to actually get into groups. at some point in middle school i found shinee's sherlock through music on demand on our tv and i listened to it on repeat so much. i never had the mind to look them up though? so the possibility of a kpop hfx in middle school was close! i believe this was right before BTS got big in the US and little me was a hater of popular things (this emo..) so i never listened to them sort of out of spite lol.
so, really ive had the kpop enjoyer gene but it needed something to kickstart it.. which was my roomie M who brought txt into my life. i will mention that roomie was a little bit of an enhypen anti which is what led me to know of their existence.. + kiki captivated me so hard i just Had to know more... now were here LOL.
i would love if you had any 2nd/3rd gen groups/songs to recommend! roomie M shows us a lot of kpop mvs sometimes when were having a mv night. no pressure though, just if you have the time! thanks for the read meowzer :)
no subject
Date: 2025-10-14 01:02 am (UTC)don't even get me started on liam's death... i'm gonna need to make an entire separate entry post about that considering i wouldn't be able to convey how insane that was for my friends and i in a single comment lmfao... and i'd love to see those slides btw they're probably so fun!! i'm curious about your ships and everything!!
i mentioned how i got into enha on alterspring before but i want to get into detail about that once i manage to write the last part of these entry series so... look forward to that (or not!)
also now i really want to make some song recs, since there's so many of them that i think are fundamental if you're getting into kpop or even if you are part of only a singular kpop fandom, so do expect that too hehe.
thank you for reading saturn i appreciate it a lot!! and thank you for sharing your own experience too <3
no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 06:35 pm (UTC)it's been so fascinating to read here how strong a hold facebook had in fandom spaces back then? i'm sure i'm a bit older than you - by the time facebook was open to non-university students, i was 14 & was using it mostly to keep in touch w/ elementary school & online friends i met elsewhere. for all the fandom stuff i'd already started going onto tumblr, lj, and the occasional forum. feels like facebook fandom had its own unique culture & experience!! intriguing...
the boys was my first snsd comeback!!! WAHHH i got so excited when i reached this part in your post. heheh!!! i had a slightly similar experience when i first got into kpop in 2008 - i got into wonder girls in a big way through their collaboration with stardoll, then forgot about them for years!
the ignoring zayn but talking about kyungsoo on their shared bday bit had me cracking up... i remember in 2013 my friend circle all realized those 2 were the same age & crashed out... (were you a kyungsoo stan? i have a useless but important followup question in case you were...)
also YES i love a good 2nd gen playlist omg the people (me) are clamoring for your favs...
wait time to revisit junjo romantica actually i need to see how it holds up today ngl
it's always so wonderful to have someone close & esp irl to share interests with & be really comfortable with. so glad you had that!! ♡
no subject
Date: 2025-10-14 01:17 am (UTC)wow stardoll!!! i haven't heard that name in YEARS, that best friend i mention by the end of the entry was obsessed with that game around 2010-2011 too if i'm not mistaken about the dates, so maybe if i didn't get into kpop the way i did i would still have found out about it through my friend? who knows...
i'm definitely making a playlist with recs!! there's a couple of gems i want everyone to know about... also! i was actually a baekhyun stan, but i'm very curious about that question now!! please let me know... (and if you do revisit junjo i would love a commentary on it LMFAO...)
thank you so much for reading and commenting <333
no subject
Date: 2025-11-05 03:52 pm (UTC)