#like. especially if you're an artist and this is part of your livelihood i get it!

[utilitycaster]

I understand why people make posts like "would anyone be interested in (fic/art/meta concept)" but I cannot really relate to them. If I write meta it's because I wanted to and if I write fic it's because a ghost is holding my brain hostage until I finish it.

[misted-dream]

welcome to mad city.ᐟ ⭒˚｡⋆

the city with endless opportunities, every possibility at your fingertips. how will you settle into city life?

mad city playlist 🎧 . . . mad city nct127 go nctdream 119 nctdream skyscraper nct127 escort chaseatlantic too late chaseatlantic escape from la theweeknd one of the girls theweeknd the bat nctu

info . . . timeline of events career descriptions are not synopses. fic infos will be published separately.

. . . introducing the districts 🏍️ ·—̳͟͞͞

you’ve now entered . . . district 127 .ᐟ ♱ ₊˚⊹꒷ the business district — people here work hard, but they play even harder.

💼 careers :

s.jn ☆ barista — in this bustling part of town, this coffee shop is where most go to take a break from the fast-paced city life. | select can i take your name?

n.yt ☆ detective — not-so-petty crimes plague the streets of mad city. it's your job to get to the bottom of each and every case. | select good cop, bad cop | moodboard

k.dy ☆ personal assistant — become the personal assistant to one of the most influential men in mad city. | select lipstick stain

j.jh ☆ chief executive — as the chief executive officer, you're responsible for a whole empire and a bit more. | select all tied up

you’ve now entered . . . district 119 .ᐟ ‧₊˚✩彡 the entertainment district — whatever your definition of fun is, you’ll find it all here.

🃏 careers :

l.hc ☆ dealer — not the most legal or safe way to make a living, but when it pays, it pays. | select lose my number

n.jm ☆ bartender — being a bartender at one of district 119's most popular clubs comes with some irregular perks. | select string theory

l.jn ☆ con artist — when your whole livelihood is based on being cunning, the skills you learn can come in quite handy. | select indebted

you’ve now entered . . . district V .ᐟ ♛ .𖥔 ݁ ˖ the capital district — home to the highest echelons. it may all look like glitz and glamour, but people here are especially skilled at turning a blind eye.

🍸 careers :

l.yy ☆ spy — work undercover and collect insider information to help put the most notorious cartel leader in mad city behind bars. | select behind enemy lines

x.dj ☆ escort — accompany socialites to the most fancy and private of events. | select private invitation

d.sc ☆ heiress — try to keep out of trouble as the heiress of a life-changing inheritance. | select between heaven and hell

© misted-dream 2024

[beautifulpersonpeach]

I don't call myself army, just a music fan, like to follow grown up fans of kpop and other groups and honestly up until now I thought your characterization of kpop fans and multis behavior to BTS was very one-sided and overblown. But now I'd like to offer you an apology Bpp. I keep up with a bunch of kpop podcasts run by kpop fans and black women and I follow this 30+ black woman whose whole shtick is being in kpop for vibes, not engaging in fanwars and overall being above the gross behavior from immature racist armys. So imagine my horror when I open my Twitter today and the first thing I see is this:

https://twitter.com/SideShowShit/status/1647483768423464961?s=20

My heart is so heavy and burdened by this I don't even know where to start bpp. Just last week I saw a Shinee/taemin/multi fan say the hate against Jimin should 'show give those armys a taste of what they do' when Jimin has been the target of overwhelming hate from the same shinee fans since his debut. I'm thinking to just leave kpop completely because this kind of brain rot in adults over nothing makes me depressed as fuck. I sympathize more with armys now more than ever. I love Jimin and don't want to stop actively following him. How do you deal with all this hate? Seriously how do you do it?

***

Hi Anon,

Your link.

Abridged answer: "I got no worries because you can't stop me lovin' myself" - reference linked here. :)

Long-form answer:

Like I've said before, if you've managed to make your way to the podcast side of k-pop stan environments you already have my condolences lmao. I won't state the exact reasons for that here but you're already experiencing a few of those reasons it seems.

That user is actually familiar to me - she's a black woman who works in the US entertainment industry, Hollywood to be exact, in a semi-administrative role. That person is a Blink who runs in the same circles as Ash - a k-pop writer/podcaster and multi in the US; Carrie - an Exol and Shawol in Toronto who writes K-drama/film reviews; Tamar - a Jewish Blink and multi who is a k-pop journalist; and a bunch of other k-pop writers, journalists, DJs, and otherwise 'grown-ups in k-pop' who can't seem to speak even in a neutral capacity about BTS, let alone ARMY, despite many of them deriving their livelihoods from the spread of k-pop in the West spearheaded in a large part by BTS. It's partly why ARMYs are extremely skeptical of k-pop journalism because oftentimes these content creators, journalists or reviewers are just stans of other groups with barely concealed animus for BTS. And also why the quality of critical conversations in k-pop fandom is so poor. I mean, how can you trust the opinion of an adult Black woman who should intimately know the implications of racism, calling Jimin, Oli London, unprovoked? It's all so comical but also kinda tragic lol.

You sent me this ask just as I was publishing this post so perhaps you hadn't yet seen what I've said about the dominant behaviours of k-pop stans in fandom.

I understand how painful it is to see things like that but I suggest you ignore them, report and block the account if it bothers you that much, but otherwise focus on celebrating Jimin and the things you love about him. I keep saying that hate does nothing but create more of the same. Many of the people who belong to rival fandoms, especially the fandoms that have a history of being abusive to BTS and ARMY since as far back as 2014, including fans of Shinee, EXO, Beast, Super Junior, and since 2018, BlackPink, many of the people in those fandoms default to hating anything connected to BTS, and it fascinates me even now how it's like a social contagion.

If seeing opinions like that really distress you, it's okay to step back from k-pop completely. In fact I recommend it for people who tend to get really emotionally connected to the artists they support, because none of those people are going to learn to do better, and chances are you could begin mirroring their behaviour if you get too attached. I'm friends with many people from those fandoms because they've known me since before I became ARMY, they know what I think, value, and tolerate, and they share the same values as me. But a few of those friends have been sort of 'excommunicated' from their fandoms because they refuse to engage in the hate towards BTS, and this happens far more often than you think.

I write as much as I do about this topic because I get it. Nobody wants to see shit like that. But at the same time, those sentiments towards Jimin and BTS have always existed and Jimin is still happy, thriving, more concerned with knowing what his fans think about his music, so if he's the reason you're here, then focus on him.

For me it's really that simple.

[thelightofthingshopedfor]

re: your tags on the post defending people being dramatique about reblogs; whoever ghosted you over that is a dick, but also there has GOT to be a happy medium between "fuck you if you don't reblog everything you feel positively about" and "fuck you for asking for reblogs" like omg, tumblrinas plz, i am begging for like half an ounce of nuance i know this is the internet but please for the love of the blorbos stop the madness *headdesk*

I mean, yeah, I don't actually think guilt/shame is a good motivation for engaging with fandom, for a lot of different reasons, and tbh the overall tone of the post I just reblogged is probably more abrasive or something than what I've reblogged before or said myself. I mostly just reblogged this one because apparently I can't get over how hurt I feel over the whole basically-being-ghosted-by-a-long-term-friend thing (especially given that it made me feel really insane in a specifically neurodivergent way, like, "either I have massively misinterpreted literally everything about this relationship for years because I fundamentally don't understand friendship or social interactions in general, or you didn't mean anything you said to me, or you changed the rules at some point and didn't tell me").

but it's also just...deeply frustrating that even the mildest posts saying "if you don't do some very basic things to support the fanworks you like, you will start seeing a lot less of those fanworks, because those creators will get discouraged and stop producing it" gets categorized as whining or guilt-tripping when it isn't, it's literally just describing cause and effect. there are other posts scolding fan creators for expressing that discouragement or asking for a little damn engagement because we just want to feel like we're part of a community, all of which just contributes to the atmosphere of discouragement.

and it feels increasingly bizarre to me the more time I spend on Instagram, following all kinds of artists and small businesses, all of whom talk a lot about how important engagement is to what they do and how much their work lives and dies by The Algorithm and how crucial it is for people to take a few seconds and boost stuff they like because otherwise it just gets lost to the void, and I don't see the same backlash there of "well you should just be satisfied with creating for yourself, you shouldn't worry about stats, stop whining for attention, stop guilt-tripping people," whatever. granted, it's a different matter when there's money involved, because with a small business whose only source of advertising is social media, we're talking about someone's actual livelihood, but there's a huge amount of crossover with literally any artist--fanartist or otherwise--given that loads of them do also have Patreons or Ko-fi links or shops with physical items, or maybe they don't start out that way but when they build an audience organically they're able to bring in some actual money. and I've definitely seen people who aren't primarily selling things, who really are just producing art as a hobby, but still ask people to share their stuff because it encourages them to make more, and that seems to be seen as perfectly legitimate, except on Tumblr and also Reddit. fanfic is a little different because it's inherently an extremely bad idea to monetize, so there isn't the angle of "of course you want to share this so your favorite writer can keep food on the table!" but it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to say it follows a similar principle, right? if you like it, it just makes sense to support it in some small way, because then you're more likely to keep getting it? and if you don't make any effort to support it, then you can't complain when you stop getting it? (making this very basic point got me downvoted on r/Fanfiction because of course it did.)

and, I don't know, I personally get really discouraged begging for reblogs, and it would feel a lot better if I didn't have to. not even just my own fic (although, yes, especially that), but original posts about helpful resources or awesome Kickstarters or fic recs or cool free games or "hey this artist is doing charity commissions, look at their awesome art, please reblog so they can raise money for this important cause" mostly just all kinda fall into the void. not that I'm at all unique in that respect, obviously; anyone who doesn't have a big audience deals with that frustration (while people who do have big audiences get to deal with different problems, as I understand it, although I certainly wouldn't know from experience). it just sucks, you know?

[skaldish]

i'm really curious if there are any good heathen/asatru/etc etsy shops that are openly against white supremacism and racism. like when you look around there's so many valknuts (🤔) plus a ton of overelaborate celtic knots, staves from the galdrabok being called "viking runes", runes themselves being plastered on everything, shitty-looking Alpha Male leather and "paracord" whatever that is......it feels so hard to trust what's for sale, and that's not even getting into the marvel merch. do you have any personal recommendations, especially in terms of jewelry?

I'm not going to lie, jewelry is very tough in this department. Jewelers find a good niche in the Norse scene, and I suspect many of them don't want to impact their sales by isolating what is, unfortunately, a significant part of their audience. Many are going to be quiet about their stances in favor of increased sales.

Additionally, Etsy's a platform where sellers have to compete for sales (I assume this is where you're looking). In order to boost views/purchases, they'll give their products long titles with popularly-searched keywords like "viking, wicca, celtic, runes" etc, so it's more likely to show up in a search result. It's true some sellers are ignorant, but most of the time they're intentionally sacrificing accuracy in favor of keyword optimization.

If I'm buying from Etsy, I look for a wide variety of "nondenominational" dogwhistles as opposed to the presence of isolated valknuts or Tyr runes. It's a hard no-go if stores have the Black Sun or any confederate/patriotic/alpha male shit in them. I also tend to avoid stores that a lot of that sensationalized and aggressive "viking" energy behind them.

Stores I feel alright buying from generally have a more neutral vibe to them. They tend to sell more elegant pieces, a greater variety of themes, and pieces that evoke goddesses and jötunn (including Loki and his kids) alongside the more masculine viking stuff. This tells me they're not just trying to appeal to dudebros but numerous demographics.

(Little rule of thumb? Artists are very lousy at hiding their biases in their work. You just gotta know what to look for.)

Now, this doesn't guarantee that the seller is against white supremacy and racism. Nothing does beyond demonstrating a direct stance, which, again, is not something jewelry shops will vocalize because their shop is likely their entire livelihood—you don't dedicate that much time and resources on producing original bronze and silver jewelry for it to be a hobby. It's a sticky situation.

I don't really have any direct suggestions beyond just using your best judgement. I will, however, invite people to comment and reblog with their suggestions. I'm personally not aware of everything that's out there and would love to see what people think.