A Korean's view on the difference between K-fans and I-fans.

(Preface: So this is from my friend oniontaker's Formspring  He's a Korean expat and awesome subber, and genuinely cool dude. Obviously the first part is the question asked of him.)

 

You know how there are fanwars all over international kpop fandoms, right? I've always wondered if the same issues are experienced among kfans as well. For instance, the fanwar that happened between some international ELFs and Sones over the GDA Daesang.

It used to be that only K-fans used to call each other out and 'fight' in an explicit sense, but with the sudden surge in the number of i-fans enjoying K-pop it seems like dividing lines are already appearing and that fanwars are becoming more frequent.

Clearly, having the same interests, iELF and K-ELF are likely to get angry over the same thing, as are iSONE and K-SONE, iHottest and K-Hottest etc. So if there is a serious issue, both the international wing and Korean wings of any fandom are likely to be involved.

But it would seem that in Korea, people of all ages take sides of allegiance, whereas internationally the demographic of passionate fans seems to be concentrated in teenagers.

Teenagers probably won't take very kindly to this but it's teens tend to be more self-centred, insecure and emotional idiots due to the transitional effects of puberty and the peer pressures in school life. So they tend to be more over-dramatic about everything, whereas the older fans are more chilled and couldn't give a fuck about what other fandoms think.

This makes international fans a potentially more volatile group.

Some of the exceptions would be DC08 and the frenzy over Jay Park in 2009. But boygroups tend to have very young fans who are passionately for (and in this case for antis, passionately against) certain figures.

K-fandoms have a long history. Perhaps this is why they have mellowed or matured. There are still people who leave hate messages on public message boards but big fan communities frown on trolling and fanwar behaviour. They make it a point to discourage members from engaging in conflict.

Take the Korean site bestiz for example: it is prolific and every idol group shares the same forum, with a Big Bang thread on top of a TVXQ thread on top of a SuJu thread on top of a Big Bang thread on top of a SNSD thread etc. Yet nobody trolls fans of another group and if anything, posts anything they are curious about. This kind of behaviour is unthinkable in say, on the 6theory forums.