This is a draft of one of the essays from my forthcoming collection, It’s A Really Rich Text, a series of personal essays about K-pop and my unique experience. Subscribe if you want to read the rest and my other monthly essays. I wonder if I should have broken this down into chapters. Let me know!
I’ve never been a lover girl.
I’m a proud hater girl, forged from the fires of being fat in the early 2000s.
To succumb to love is to make a fool of yourself, okay? I used to fantasize about taking on a more loveable form, the type who can love without having to worry if it’s a joke.
Being a hater girl is a lifestyle.
It’s never sharing your feelings first.
It’s being the cool girl who doesn’t care that much.
It’s about never falling too hard.
It’s always telling your friends they can do better because you are the hater girl. You would never be dumb enough to fall that deep. Maybe you’ve never had the chance.
And you never will…at least not on purpose.
Not in this economy.
Let me tell you something. Hater girls are food for K-pop.
I’d know. I got eaten up.
Chapter 1: The Hater Girl Finds Love
That first year of K-pop fandom was kind of a blur in how that type of love always feels blurry because you don’t recognize yourself in it. It feels like another version. When I fell, I fell hard. I’d always been a teeny bopper type, a fan girl to the end. My childhood bedroom closet still has cutouts of Lil Bow Wow, NSYNC, Nelly, Hayden Christensen, and more.
Honestly, looking back, I was supposed to be a lover girl, but I never got around to it.
Sure — I loved but it wasn’t the same. It was a playful type of love, the love that’s like playing with dolls and having them kiss in character. Malibu Barbie and Ken. It was love that thrived within a fantasy. There was something so tangible and real about the K-pop idols.
South Korea is great at capturing and selling intimacy. It’s a whole thing. So much of their culture and entertainment is about being in someone’s space knowing them and experiencing them in the most intimate ways.
This type of intimacy is pretty common among social media celebrities, but it’s not exactly mainstream. There’s not an industry for seeing people and knowing them in the best and most comforting life. We have tea culture which is about knowing more and liking celebrities less. The more you know, the less invested you will be.
The carefully controlled activities of the idols provide this illusion of knowing someone perfect in all the most attractive ways. It’s a dollhouse that you are in without knowing it’s a dollhouse. It’s like being at a strip club, but not knowing it. In real life, men are messy. They say the wrong things. In the K-pop world, they say the wrong thing, but it’s endearing. It’s the type of soft wrongness that shows up in romance books.
Idols are also beautiful in the most impossible ways. Their skin is perfect and no pores. Sharp eyes. Thin bodies. The type of impossibly inaccessible beauty in real life, but you can hold on to it here. You don’t have to worry that you aren’t hot enough. Of course, you are! The casual intimacy tricks you into feeling like you take up the same space like you can reach out and touch them. The “everywhere” nature feels like they are in your life too.
(Unless you are not, that’s another essay)
And that’s why the love is so easy.
In reality, we don’t know much about these idols beyond vague stories and references. This is on purpose, too. BTS talks about the dumpling incident as if it’s the last fight they’ve had when there must be others. They don’t have partners. They want no one but you.
You get little to work with, but it’s enough. There’s this thing people say on TikTok a lot. A crush is just a lack of information. That applies here. The only difference is you never get more information. It’s just a never-ending crush.
And because of that, these idols present a kind of stability that you’ll rarely get in real life. We can say Yoongi or Namjoon would never treat us like that situationship, but we don’t know, do we?
It’s perfect for scared bitches like me!
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Hey Shenee! to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.