basically tell your story of how you got into a group you currently stan.
i will tell multiple of mine, but just one for now.
okay so it was early 2017 and i was looking for music shows to watch (like the voice and such) and saw the word kpop. idk what i saw it on, possibly kpop star i guess. anyway, i was curious about the 'show' so i looked it up. obviously, i found out that it was a music genre. me being curious, i searched kpop on youtube and stumbled across blood sweat and tears by bts. after that, i started watching more bts content. it was also how i first starting learning 'big' groups of names and i got confused more often. like I'm pretty sure i kept messing up jhope and suga (idk how). ngl while listing names from memory i forgot jhope the most. somehow jungkook was the first one i remembered and was my bias for a day before suga was.
also, i have a slight obsession for music competition shows. literally the second thing i did once i got into kpop was discover and watch produce 101
Back when I was quite new to K-Pop, only knowing of the groups BTS and BLACKPINK as they were so popular and well-known, my friend suggested that I listen to Red Velvet. The first song I listened to was ‘Peekaboo’ and I was instantly hooked. I later found their diverse discography and how vocally talented the group was, and by then I was a fan. The fun personalities of the girls pushed me to finally stan Red Velvet.
well I got into bts (my first kpop group) when my friend showed me gee by snsd and I liked it and I went home that night and listened to it again and fire by bts was recommended so I listened to that and I liked it and listened to more.
with loona (my favorite group) I was in 8th grade history class on my school iPad on amino and there was the loona community and I was like I never heard of them before so I joined it. And after school I listened to love cherry motion and I was like sure I’ll stan. And look where we are today.
In fact, I stan a lot of groups but I wanna talk about Stray kids 'cause they are my ult group. So I basically listen to their songs since "I am you" era, but they never made such a big impression on me before they become my ult group, but I enjoy to listen their songs. One day I heard "Double knot" and I decided to watch their another videos and hear their songs. I strated to enjoy their videos and I was most impressed from the video and the text of "Hellevator". And I start to love this group a lot
Seventeen:
I had been binge watching a bunch of Weekly Idol 2x faster dance videos, and came across the one for Don't Wanna Cry. I was amazed that they were such good dancers, so in sinc, the choreography was amazing, and it was a contemporary dance. I then looked into the members and began to bias Vernon because he is from America and he starts Don't Wanna Cry. Then I watched the actual dance practice for it and fell in love with The8 because of this beautiful jump in the dance. I learned more about him and he is now my bias!
so me being me, i research about groups to stan.
well i had heard about kpop, and i had said it wasnt good (even though i didnt even know what it was)
one day, i was bored, so i decided to research about BTS, who i had heard about
welp, i got sucked into the world of kpop, and never seen again
so I was browsing Netflix for something to watch, you know normal things and I stumbled across real GOT7. so basically the first time I ever saw them was A era but it june 2017. their crackheadedness made me stan also A is a cringy bop so...
A.C.E
ace was actually the third official group I stanned (excluding golden child because i didn’t follow them much after their show) and it was the first group I stanned so close to their debut. like it was only 1 month after their debut so.. anyway, I was watching busking videos of bts songs and came across one of theirs. I found out from the comments that they had debuted as a group so I checked them out. I basically became obsessed with cactus, I literally forced my mom to listen to it. I’ve seen the mv so many times.
i was at my friends house and heard some foreign music (this was also the first time i had ever heard kpop) and followed the noise to his room. After (eventually) getting through the mess of stuff he left on the floor i found these colourful dances on his tv and fell in love with Suga's charming smile. And within the 2 seconds it took for him to run into the room and throw himself at the screen blushing i had decided i was ARMY.
i’ll tell about how i got into (g)i-dle. so im not proud of this but i used to actually be a (g)i-dle hater (but i never actually told anyone i didn’t like them/comment bad things abt them). when they first debuted (this was a stupid reason, it was because i was a salty army and was mad at how they were instantly popular unlike how bts was when they first debuted) i didnt like how popular they were so i never listened to their songs. skip forward to hann era, my curiosity lead me to watch latata (as i heard many clips of it before) and i instantly fell in love!! i then watched hann and finally understood why they were monster rookies, and decided to stan. they’re now my 3rd fav k-pop group (used to be my ult actually), and im yuqi biased : D
Well, ever since this quarantine, I got into seventeen a lot..
It’s not that I have not stabbed them before, when I was new to kpop.. they only few songs I have heard of Seventeen are Very Nice, Mansae and Highlight... then I was like meh with them.. I knew few members and couple songs and that’s it. Then I listened to HIT when it came out and I was like.. “Wow!!!” and then I was out.. then, I listened to FEAR (not right when it came out but after a while) then I was like “Nice song!” and again I was out. Then me and my friends had this idea of covering FEAR, so I was like “sure” and then I listened to the song a lot of times and then watched the dance practice video a lot of times.. then, YT started giving me a lot of SVT recommendations, so I was watching them, then I started to discover more music of them, and more content of them.. and therefore I started stanning them sooo hard ever since this quarantine.. like I was only listening to their songs. They make a really great study playlist lol
i'll share how i started stanning seventeen and nu'est bc its pretty similar.
this was maybe december 2016ish or the beginning of 2017. i had just gotten properly into kpop after years of listening to a few songs/artists, and i was in full army swing. back then i would watch videos on youtube that collected clips from mvs from different artists, and that's how i found new groups/songs to listen to. in a couple videos there were clips of seventeen's very nice and nu'est's overcome, both great songs, and coincidentally it was always the same clips that prominently featured jeonghan and ren, respectively, each with their extensions/wigs. i personally have a thing for guys with long hair so i was immediately going "who is he?!". of course the songs were great too.
after that with seventeen, i was intimidated by the number of guys, but i liked their songs a lot and a friend of a friend encouraged me to just keep listening. well sometime in february i sat down for a week and binged seventeen big debut plan AND one fine day 13 castaways. it didn't take long for me to see that their size wasn't that intimidating and that its one of their great assets. after that it was don't wanna cry's release and i LOVED that song and album, still love them. some days after their 2nd anniversary i sat down to watch their anniversary vlive. i don't remember exactly what was said, but at one point s.coups said something vaguely along the lines of "all carats are valid we love each and every one" and idk why. it just hit me really hard? and i started crying? i always consider that moment the moment i stopped ulting bts and started ulting seventeen.
as for nu'est, when i checked their other songs i realized i'd seen some of them before. i was very certain i'd seen at least face and sleep talking before, years earlier. but i didn't have their songs on my ipod and didn't initially recognize their name, so i guess i either wasn't that into them at first or forgot, since back then i'd sometimes just watch a bunch of kpop mvs and then go back to watching anime or reading a book, without saving songs or videos. anyway this was around the time that produce 101 s2 was being announced including nu'est's participation. i still didn't know that much about the industry, so i had no frame of reference that nu'est weren't popular and all that. just before the show started i watched a fan documentary, listened to their songs and became a fan. that made watching produce 101 s2 quite the emotional roller coaster (i had to take a break for while bc at first i was crying every episode for nu'ests sake). but of course things are much better now.
BTS: I found out about them pretty much by accident. lol I was having some fun on Wiki on September 2, 2017 and stumbled upon their article, which led me to buy my first BTS album, You Never Walk Alone. Then, on the 16th, somebody on Twitter posted a pic of Namjoon, and I casually asked them who it was... and twenty minutes later, I had a whole thread introducing me to BTS (s/o to bitmojin on Twitter), so here I am!
Monsta X: I first came across their name during one of those Fan Army Face-Offs on Twitter, and tbh it did NOT have a very good first impression on me bc I thought it was just another angry Western rapper. lol It wasn't until December 16, 2018 that I finally caved and decided to give them a fighting chance. I started to like them at that point, but not exactly to the point of stanning yet. In fact, I didn't start stanning until last year, just after Wonho left. (I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST THE GUY, though; just bad timing lol)
Pentagon: It started with a simple pic of Wooseok. I was playing our "Name the idol from a pic" game, and I got Wooseok; of course, I didn't know who he was yet, so I wildly guessed Shownu. lol But yeah, you can definitely say I fell down the rabbit hole after that!
BTS: Long story short, oomf on Instagram posted about them a lot but I thought they were just funny dudes, also I kept checking Tumblr's top ships of the year since my fave was always at the top (that's a whole nother story), discovered Jikook from that list and thought "huh, I feel like ruining my life", I'm assuming I watched BST after that so yeah, that's how I got into BTS (and kpop in general)
MYTEEN: I used to be apart of a BTS forums site back in early 2018 and someone was trying to promote them on the forums so me (being the nice person I am), decided to check out their debut and told the person that hey! they're super cute and I really liked their debut, so I guess they were the second group that I fell in love with
ONF: uhhhh I think this started around late 2018 but I listened to Complete a lot on Spotify whenever I was gaming and I dunno, I just assumed they were an "older" group like got7 or svt but didn't do any research on them, then flash forward to August of 2019 when I was listening to music on youtube and Happily Never After was on my queue... again, I just thought they were an older group so I was like huh, neat but then I discovered Ice & Fire shortly afterward and that was when I started falling for them
Nope, it was because I mostly used the site on my school computer but after a few months, the district decided to block Disqus so I couldn't use it anymore