Saturday, January 7, 2023

Opinion Today: I may have started a rumor about K-pop. The fallout is ruining my life.

No, BTS is not a Korean psy-op.

Suddenly, people wanted me to talk only about BTS. And not just BTS but specifically how — according to some — BTS members were basically golems made by the South Korean government for the purpose of public diplomacy.

Photograph via Bighit Music

By Euny Hong

In 2014, I wrote a book about how South Korea became the pop cultural powerhouse that it is today. One of my theses was that starting in the 1990s, Korean government officials had mobilized to increase the soft power of their country by becoming a global pop culture exporter.

That idea ran away from me. That's what ideas do. People heard what they wanted to hear. And they fell into two camps: One camp used my book as proof that the Korean cultural wave — including BTS, the K-pop boy band that shattered chart records previously held by the Beatles — was bankrolled by the South Korean government. The second camp wanted my head on a spike, and accused me of stoking the fire of the first camp.

As I wrote in a guest essay for Opinion this week, incurring the wrath of BTS stans — possibly the most powerful fandom in pop music history — has kind of ruined my life. ​And why not? For years, skeptics of Korea's newfound cultural prominence have been asking me: Is BTS a puppet of the Korean government? Increasingly absurd rumors sprung up as BTS became better known in the United States, including one started by a Florida politician tying the group to an imaginary socialist plot to undermine Donald Trump and another started by a QAnon-adjacent TikToker involving McDonald's chicken nuggets and — of course — child sex trafficking.

I wanted to know why people latched onto these kinds of conspiracy theories. As I wrote in my essay, the answer isn't flattering: Many simply can't believe that a tiny, formerly destitute Asian country could have pulled off a global cultural coup unless the deep state was pulling all the strings. In their stereotypical view, Koreans could be cunning, maybe, but not creative.

That's not to say the second camp ​is ​off the hook for its digital harassment. Last year, BTS went on hiatus, a word a fellow journalist had warned me not to use in my essay. But I did, and in the days since it published, I've received more threatening tweets from BTS stans than the number of tweets I've posted in my lifetime.

But I see the reaction a little differently now than I did in 2014. In our era, writing isn't just about writing. Readers come to a story with their own passions and prejudices and assumptions, and that becomes part of the story, too.

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