LITTLE PEOPLE

Reasons & Research

If you’ve read my blogs you would know that I love KPOP. Like I seriously love KPOP. Just to prove a point I’m going to link one of my favourite songs right now so that I can just share how amazing and diverse KPOP can be.

Now that you’ve seen the awesomeness that is KPOP, you can understand why I love it so much. It’s more than flashy effects, beautiful idols and dance moves. It’s also the focus point of a growing international community. It draws in millions of fans worldwide, and just by YouTube views alone it is one of the leading music industries in the world right now. But with any fandom there are negatives, and KPOP fan-culture has a lot of them. This is my obsession, and whenever I try to think about what Tim would do for his band, I just think what I would do for KPOP. It’s scarily not too hard, and that’s the reason why I want to make this film.

It’s also because I’ve been surrounded by obsessive cultures my whole life as well. Growing up I watched anime and read Japanese manga for almost 6 hours a day. I would come home from school and consume this entertainment mindlessly. And I’m not alone with this destructive behaviour. There is now a growing otaku population in Japan and Western cultures, who’s only purpose in life is to consume and dedicate time towards fictional worlds and characters. This area has been studied before, with people hypothesizing that with the growing number of products and their availability that this behaviour was going to rise anyway, but I believe it is also because social media and the internet has made it all so much more accessible that we have this issue today. I mean looking back over the last century we had the Beatles with their fangirls, and now it’s no different. The only difference is that it is so much easier today to stalk you idol by hacking into their persona accounts or to use advanced surveillance hardware and software to monitor their every move. To become a celebrity today is to make your life a public spectacle apparently, and I want to see why people go into this space of no privacy anymore.

Below are a few readings I’ve found that comment on Japanese fandom culture, which could be translated to both Korean sasaengs and Western fanboys.

References

Stevens, C. (2010) You Are What You Buy: Postmodern Consumption and Fandom of Japanese Popular Culture Japanese Studies pp199-214

Cubbison, L. (2005) Anime Fans, DVDs, and the Authentic Text The Velvet Light Trap – A Critical Journal of Film and Television pp45-57