#i got heavily into kpop and started following certain groups and learning more about groups and the music industry

[applepidotcom]

taemin is such a whore i love it

[kxlebcross]

hippity hoppity here goes the long ass rant about my cousin

for context - i was a kid when i started liking kpop, like 13-14 yrs old? i was still collecting plushies, reading magazines for young teens, enjoying some music and playing sims. yes, i may have had my emo episode back then with some heavy music too, and that never went well with my mum’s older sister and her heavily religious husband, but oh boi, the worst was my cousin. she is 6 yrs older than me and that was around the time she started picking out an university to go to, so the focus HAD to be on her, the important future student and her boyfriend and this and that... she was always going on about going to art school and she was really fucking talented so she had all chances to be a really great artist, getting married to her boyfriend, wanting a family and all her future, while i was just a middle school kid dressing in all black, who suddenly started enjoying some fun kpop song on their otherwise heavy metal/rock music playlist.

when she find out, she was GIVING ME HELL for it. do you remember 2013 kpop? adtoy by 2pm, ringa linga by gd & taeyang, gentleman by psy or fantastic baby by bigbang? i fucking loved those songs. i was a kid in a really bad place in life after moving 2 countries away from the place where i was born, from all my friends, my school, my life... listen, it’s 10 years hitting this year since my mother decided about moving and i’m still not over it, so just imagine, how bad i must’ve felt back then, when it wasn’t even a year after the move? i was a devastated little kid who found a little joy in some fun, jumpy kpop tones in contrast to the usual heavy music i was listening to usually (do you remember the oldest bring me the horizon songs, all the screaming and anger? think of it as my regular playlist, my mother hated it haha). i was never a diehard fan, never had posters of idols on my walls, i only have like 2 merch pieces (and those aren’t even original cuz we were poor and could never afford it, so i looked up the merch online and my mum had a similar thing done in a local, cheaper workshop for my birthday one time, please don’t judge me for that) and it was just music for me, as well as the english, american, japanese, polish and hungarian music was just music too. 

and i got terrible shit for it from my cousin, who pretty much criticized everything about me: my clothes (we were poor, i was mostly dressing out of second hand shops and surprise - her hand-me-downs), my shitty phone (and old samsung model i got for my 9th or 10th bday), my taste in books (i really REALLY loved king’s books to which one of my classmates introduced me back then), my inability to perfectly speak the language (though i was raised in a bilingual household, the main language in my house was hungarian, and i was a stubborn kid who rarely ever wanted to speak polish at home, so when we moved i could barely speak the language, had to take extra classes every day in school for almost the entire first school year i spent here because i had to learn to write and speak properly), but the biggest shit i always got for kpop, that it’s garbage, that i don’t even understand it, it’s just shitty party music with extra steps... i resented her for that A LOT, which probably had smth to do with the age difference too, but hey, whatever. i always closed up when we visited them and my mum was understanding about it, she pretty much allowed me to just hang around the place and listen to my music, play on my phone or just read a book, and my aunt hated it - but it was at least peaceful, i occasionally got the kpop jab from my cousin which i shrugged off, but that was it... until one time i spoke up.

i can’t remember what it was about - but we were all having lunch and it was easter or christmas maybe, and at a certain point i got called out for something, maybe using my phone under the table? anyway, i spoke up about treating me like shit because i was already 15 by that and i had a big fucking mouth and no tolerance for their bullshit after listening to it for two years, which ended in my mother almost going into a shock after hearing my vicious remark, my aunt’s husband going into a raging fit and my aunt telling my mum that she’s a terrible mother and raised a terrible kid. we left after that and i didn’t return to them in the following years - i just heard from the grapevine that my cousin ended up dropping out of college because “it was just too tiring and too much”, broke up with her boyfriend and then was just sleeping around with some random dudes, and generally just misrailed her life and had to move back in with her parents who were devastated after all their hopes about my cousin went to hell.

i haven’t seen them for years - we sort of reconciled a few years later when my mother forced me to do it; my cousin probably forgot by then whatever shit she was giving me earlier and we hanged out a bit, caught up and shit... i’m pretty sure it was only because she was to get married to her boyfriend and wanted the whole family there? not important. 

the boyfriend is a pretty awful person imo tbh - he has some nationalist tendencies, not once spoke up in a very homophobic and derogatory way about all kind of lgbtq+ people, which in the end resulted in me removing him from all my social medias, because miss me with that nationalism babe. anyway, they got married and moved into their own place and into the family spotlight again, while i finished school and then years after their wedding my mum announced very proudly that i finished school with good grades and got into university - which immediately stirred the shit in the old shit bucket our relations were. my own fucking aunt dared saying that i’ll never succeed in life and will drop out than her own daughter would because i’m not made for a successful life. she never said it to my face - said it to my mother, who gave up a job she loved just so she could send me half a country away from my home so i could study where i wanted. i mean, i have my own issues with my mother too but i can’t not admire her sacrifices she made for me - so that sort off hit it off again with me and i once again burned bridges with them when moving out 3 years ago. seen them maybe two times since then? i mean, i never tried reaching out to them - they only ever got some happy birthdays and merry christmases on facebook, because my mother insisted i do that. they never called or wrote back, not for my birthday, not for christmas, not for anything else. i only found out in the last few months that on that christmas 2 yrs ago, which i spent alone, they were asked by my mum to please invite me over at least for a coffee. they never even called and my mum was heartbroken over it, because she was literal thousands of kilometres away, working and counted on her sister to invite me... my mum’s friends, basically strangers, ended up inviting me over for a christmas dinner in the end. i spent a family holiday with people i’ve literally seen five times in my life and they were more than joyful to have me in their company and they even got me a present, while my technically closes family couldn’t even spare a phone call.

now i’m 23 and my cousin is closing on 30 - and she’s suddenly overcome with that kpop obsession she has, spamming both instagram and facebook with mv links, fantaken photos, band-related posts and news articles, all heart emojis and “OmG i LoVe ThEm” kind of bullshit captions, she’s intensely drooling over certain members she’s posting a lot about, i’m seeing at least 15 posts daily about her bad drawings of members of the band.... listen.... if an artist doesn’t practice for 7+ yrs, the skills they had just start to fade away even if they were really talented (trust me, i know it from my own experiences, i used to know how to draw, sing and play a few instruments when i was young but then i stopped practicing and now the most i can draw in a stickman, i can’t play any instruments for shit and i’m a low average in singing too), but she thinks she’s some motherfucking superstar of drawing portraits (trust me, shes NOT) and keeps spamming all those pics and posts and shit.... and just seeing that sort of brought the memories back, of her treating me like shit over a thing she’s now obsessed with and i’m just sitting here like.... gag.

i could absolutely understand being a fan and being a group stan but there is a certain limit after which being a fan turns into that gross, twisted thing. do you know all those memes that go along the lines of “i don’t hate kpop because of the music, i hate kpop over the r*tarded fans it has”? that’s a whole ass mood. i’m sure that everyone who’s at least interested in kpop heard of the insane psychofan part of the fanbase.... and she’s turning into it. she’s fucking drooling over some famous strangers while she’s like... 30. and has a husband. would it be so hard for her to “keep it in her pants”? i’m super NOT interested in seeing all that crazy fan shit she’s pulling and honestly she’s grossing me out and you know people like her are the reason i can’t even fucking enjoy kpop anymore the way i did earlier - because it’s being fucking pushed down my god damned throat every-fucking-where i look. just calm the very fuck down, please. behave like a god fucking damned adult. 

[missjjang]

Hey Inspirits, can we talk about INFINITE’s contract renewal?

So I woke up kind of emotional today, and I really want/need to know other peoples opinions about this to maybe calm myself down? Try to cope with it? Idk

Since 2017 started I’ve been on edge about INFINITE disbanding, considering that their 7 year contract with Woollim ends in June. I’ve been an Inspirit since their debut in 2010, and they’ve helped me so much thus far in my life, and seeing the prospect of them disbanding this year just makes my heart break in a million pieces and show how unready I am to let go of them. So, I’ve been trying to think about motives on why they would or wouldn’t disband, and I can’t make up my mind, so I wanna know what the rest of the fandom thinks, if any of you want to talk about it.

So shall we discuss? :3 (like really, if anyone wants to talk about it, let’s talk ;;)

1) They’ll renew their contract and continue on: I don’t doubt for a second that the boys all have amazing relationships between themselves and that they like each other a lot, which is one of the motives some groups disband when the opportunity shows up.

I also think that for a group that has been 7 years into the game all the boys have pretty strong individual activities, and none of them feels ridiculously mistreated by their company or left behind, which is another pretty strong reason why groups disband (4minute aka Hyuna and the others) or some members leave the group (L.joe wanting to act and have a solo but TOP Media only concentrating on Niel’s solo career) - Sunggyu has his musical actor career, his solo career and his mc career; Woohyun has his subunit career (you never know, we might get a Toheart comeback, who knows), his solo career and his acting career (he hasn’t done much and some movies he did were cancelled but it’s not like Woollim hasn’t ever got him work on that field, and I believe he can pursue that if he wants); Dongwoo has his subunit career (quite popular at that) and his musical actor career; Howon has his subunit career (again, quite popular) and his acting career (that is doing really well); Sungyeol has his subunit career and his acting career (he could get more projects nowadays, I agree, but I’m sure that can be arrenged, he has acted in quite some dramas in the past); Myungsoo has his subunit career, his acting career (we all know how we don’t have to worry about this one) and even a kind of photography career? With the little projects and photo albums he has released; and Sungjong has his subunit career and his somewhat variety show career (you know, when he went to Real Men and the jungle and all that; he is the one that worries me the most about being unsatisfied with his solo management alongside Sungyeol, but he’s the maknae, he’s still quite young and has a long time to strive for other things).

They’ve showed how much they love being together as INFINITE inumerous times already and how they seem to enjoy what they do. The most recently one was in INFINITE Rally 3 where they extended the whole thing by like 2 hours (or that’s what the fanaccounts that I read talked about). They also work really hard as a team, not really going more than 6 months of hiatus as an entire group - they’re always either in Korea, in Japan or doing showcases and concerts around Asia or around the world. If you look at their discography, there isn’t a single year they haven’t released a new CD in Korea since 2010, and that’s quite difficult to find, be it new groups, old groups, popular groups, flopped groups. Which also shows how Woollim puts effort in managing them. They’ve also had a pretty fair amount of reality shows of their own (Sesame Player, Birth of a Family, Ranking King, This is Infinite, Infinite Showtime)  and special episodes in established TV programs (Weekly Idol, Beatles Code and all of that). And considering they’re a group that is older than a lot of groups still active in the industry nowadays, they’re always either coming together or individually on V app every now and then, and their V app channel is only behind some pretty strong groups’ channels like Big Bang (the kings nowadays), EXO and BTS (the fever of the moment, as we all know), GOT7 iKON and TWICE (the new generation’s sweethearts that everyone loves), company v apps SM Town and YG Family (which is not fair to compare because those two channels are made of lots of groups?) and APINK (they’re the only ones that are not company v apps or the fever/the new blood of kpop that is on top of INFINITE channel so way to go APINK!!!).

Also, considering they’ve 1 to 2 years more until they all start having to go to the military service, and they’ve only 3 years until their 10th anniversary mark, one might think they would at least want to stick around as a group for that amount of time? Especially considering that if they want to concentrate more on individual aspects of their careers, they can do that when this military period starts, because it’s going to take some years until all of them are discharged from it and back again as 7.

And last but not least, they’ve been consistent for the past 7 years, and that’s not something to take lightly. They’re always winning awards each year, they always manage to get wins on music programs, their albums and concerts sell well and their solo/subunit adventures are quite successful. And I like to think that, as they say, you don’t change a winning team. I keep asking myself: why would they disband when they still like each other, they each have solo activities and no one feels really left behind, their group is still going strong and being sucessfull and the fandom supports them a lot?

But here comes the second option:

2) They’ll not renew their contract and go their separate ways: Now, why would they do that if it’ll not be because the members don’t get along or because they’re completely unsatisfied with their management?

Well, recently I’ve been through the follow situation: I was in a job in which I hated some aspects of it and it made me really stressed and unhappy, but at the same time there were lots of awesome things about it that made me want to keep doing it for a long time, alongside some great coworkers and lots of things to learn. My contract with this job was going to be expired in January, and I kept thinking: should I renew the contract and see up to where I can still handle the stress and unhappiness or should I take this opportunity, not renew my contract and try going to a different path (my boss had already offered the renewal to me)? I thought about all the things that I learned, all the happy moments I had as well as what else was there to learn, the stressful moments I had and reached the following decision: I didn’t not renew my contract and left my job. And that’s exactly what I think might happen to INFINITE.

They’ve been together for 7 years, which is a really long time. Think about yourself 7 years back. How much have you changed? How much has your life changed? Have you done the same thing for the past 7 years? Do you think you could handle doing something for more than 7 years? So yeah, INFINITE has been together for quite some time and they’ve learned and enjoyed a lot together. But all of them are already in their mid/late 20s, and maybe they want a change of pace. maybe they want to concentrate in individual activities and other dreams more, and the group being active would kind of get in the way of that. It’s not that they wouldn’t enjoy still being together, but maybe their priorities have changed with time, or they know want to give other priorities more attention. That’s a normal part of life, you know. And as much as I’ve said earlier that they can concentrate on their individual paths once their military period starts, since they’ll all probably go at different times and it’s going to take some years before they’re back again as 7, maybe they don’t want to way until then. As I’ve learned with my job experience, sometimes there comes a time when you know you can still profit and be happy in a certain situation for a little while longer, but you don’t wait for that time to expire. You just want to jump to new beginnings and new prospects, without fully draining all you can from your previous situation.

Which also reminds me how different the boys are and how they’ve had different things in mind even before debuting. The biggest example of that is Sunggyu - he wanted to be a main vocal for a rock band, not exactly a singer for a boygroup. Also, he has said a couple of times that he doesn’t like dancing too much. So I’ve been thinking he might want to leave the whole dancing-idol thing aside after 7 years of it. I don’t want to think like that, but it’s a possibility. Also, I feel like the members want to explore other things that they haven’t been to as a group (because of Woollim or not), like being more active in composing and having a more heavily saying in the production of their albums. Howon has already mentioned how they aren’t as integrated in the album making as they would like to be (Dongwoo did write to rap part of One Day from their last mini album Infinite Only as we could see in the behind the scenes footeage and all that, and Woohyun did compose “Together” for their Grow movie, but that’s only a little part of the whole process), and I believe that as time passes, that keeps adding more weight to their decisions.

Another thing that kinda scares me and gives me the vibes that they might be disbanding is the whole contract renewal announcement. We’re only 3 months away from the expire date and no one has said anything about them talking to Woollim about renewing or anything (although there hasn’t been news of any of the boys talking to other companies on their own, that I know of). Lots of groups don’t wait for their contract to get so close to the expire date before they renew (like CNBLUE, TEEN TOP and Girl’s Day did). So I keep thinking: what are they waiting for??? Are some of them still unsure about renewing so they’re waiting for each other to make a decision? Are they waiting for something to happen before they decide??

And one last thing: I was beyond happy when they announced they would be having a comeback in May. It’s one of my greatest joys to know that one of my favorites groups ever is confirmed for a comeback, and so soon too (and on my birthday month!). But then I saw a post saying how this might be their goodbye stage and I automatically thought: holy shit, they could do that. I totally see them doing that, it’s their style. They wouldn’t suddenly leave us. They would give us one last gift more parting on good terms. And May is the month before June, when their contract ends. Shit guys, I’m really scared about it.

(Oh! There’s also the possibility that they won’t renew with Woollim, but will all move together to another company like Block B and BEAST/HIGHLIGHT did; I think the boys like Woollim and their CEO a lot, but there’s always a possibility. But in this case I don’t really care tbh lol As long as they’re happy and together as INFINITE, I don’t care to which label they’re signed; and if they do go to different paths I’ll support all of them, of course, but not having INFINITE as a whole making music is going to break my heart ;;).

I’m sorry that this was such a huge ass post, but I really needed to get all this off my chest and I really want to discuss it with other fellow Inspirits and see what you all think. :3