A Worldwide (& Wattpad) ARMY

Confession: I love BTS.

Another confession: When I first heard of real-person fanfiction, I was slightly horrified.

Another confession: Fast-forward several years, I am now a (proud?) BTS fanfiction writer.

Shall I explain? If you're interested, keep reading. Grab a snack, this is going to be one long explanation.

Growing up – and now – I was that nerd that never stopped reading. C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe were some of the first books I ever read on my own. I read several Percy Jackson and Harry Potter books in one day. To help me to cope with a friend breakup in high school, I read an entire trilogy of books in two days. I got into heated arguments about pieces of fiction with other students in my AP Literature class. I'm an English major.

However, for my entire childhood, I never thought that I could become a writer. As far as I was concerned, writers were mythical beings, spinning stories out of thoughts like witches spinning straw into gold. I always did well on writing assignments in school; for example, in seventh grade, we were given an assignment in which we were to write a mystery story. My classmates wrote stories that were a few pages long about a piece of cake going missing. I wrote a 20-page long murder mystery. But that wasn't writing. Writing, as I knew it, was an art form.

But then, shortly after my freshman year of high school, I became enlightened with the discovery of a little thing called "fanfiction". (Let's just say that I had a bad habit of not replying to my friends' text messages because I was too busy reading Golden Age Chronicles of Narnia fanfictions.)

Suddenly, my mindset about writing changed. These people were writers, weren't they? And if they could do it, couldn't I? After working up a lot of courage much, much later, I eventually wrote a short fanfiction. When I posted it on the website where I had been drugging myself with Narnia fanfictions for months upon months, it got a pretty nice reception in the form of a few comments. I was feeling pretty good about myself – hey, maybe I can write!

And then, I went through a traumatic experience, and I forgot about writing. I distracted myself from the memories of what had happened that night by binge-watching television shows, burying myself in AP classes – most notably AP Psychology - and signing up for extracurriculars. I didn't write anything involving fiction for a very, very long time.

Also during this time, I had another moment of enlightenment. Due to the enormous amount of homework required for an advanced psychology class I was enrolled in, I tried to find music that I could listen to while also focusing on the seemingly millions of key terms. One of my friends introduced me to the wild world of a Korean pop music genre called "K-pop". From then on, I spent hours upon hours watching intricate and amazing MVs for various groups, such as U-KISS and BOYFRIEND. The two of us spent so much of our time talking about different K-pop songs, music videos, biases, and whatever else we could find out about the genre. Everyone else around us thought we were crazy, but I was happy. It is worth mentioning here that while I love K-pop, I am also a metalhead. Seriously. In the morning I put on my floral skirts and dresses and apply my soft makeup while listening to Bring Me The Horizon literally scream about drug addiction. So to announce that I love K-pop, with its synchronized dancing and beautiful men wearing effeminate makeup, was enough to make my father question my sanity.

Fast-forward a good long while. I was in my first-ever Creative Writing class, and lo and behold, it was forcing me to write. And I was doing alright at it. My instructor, someone that I really cared about and admire to this day, even told me I had talent.

One night, I went home, and just like every other night, I pulled out my psychology homework and my computer. I watched a K-pop MV, then saw in my recommended videos an MV from a group called "BTS".

I didn't know what I was getting myself into, silly me. I clicked on the video and enjoyed it. And the other BTS songs that followed.

Sometime later, my creative writing class was given an assignment: write a 2,000-word short story. At that time, I was practically drooling over the BTS music video for their song Run. (About that: it was brought to my attention that many ARMY are not aware of this song. If you are an ARMY that does not know this song, GO TO YOUTUBE AND GO WATCH THE MUSIC VIDEO. And please come back when you're done. Anyway, I digress.) The music video was simple enough, it was about a bunch of rogue men in their youth. However, in my psychology student mind, I saw other things in the music video. I saw a boy that was hiding his true feelings from even his close friends, another that spent much of his life under the influence of alcohol and other drugs, and other issues. As someone who cares a lot about how mental illnesses are treated in the media, I was intrigued.

I'm not sure how or why it came to my mind, but I was suddenly hit with an idea for a story: an alternate universe to the music video in which all the video's characters were actually patients at a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.  I asked my instructor if he wouldn't mind the 2,000 words being the first 2,000 words of the longer story, and he was fine with it. So I got to work, writing my first-ever BTS fanfiction. Looking back, it was poorly written, had little planning, and at the time I didn't really understand character development. But I was happy with it. I finished the story and posted it on a website known as Wattpad.

Believe it or not, there was a time when BTS fanfiction wasn't really a thing. (I know, it's crazy.) When I posted this story, we were in the stages when K-pop fanfiction did exist on Wattpad, but it was not popular by any stretch of the imagination, nor did it favor any particular group.

But, as we all know here on the orange W, that would change.

I am going to try to avoid talking about the actual music group BTS, as this essay will be long enough without me gushing like the fangirl that I am. Instead, I'll be sticking to the community and fanfiction side of things. (I may have to write another essay on the group BTS.)

As time went on, BTS became more and more popular. (Okay, hold in your motherly pride, Sugar Free. We've got a job to do here.) And with their popularity came more fans of BTS, known as ARMY, an abbreviation for Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth. (I know, it doesn't make any sense to me either. But that's what we're called.) People began reading my story. People began interacting with it. I received many comments and messages about how my story changed what they thought about mental illnesses, how these illnesses are portrayed, and by extent, how those incarcerated are treated.

At this same time, more and more fanfictions about BTS appeared on the site. Many now-popular accounts joined. (Here's lookin' at you, Suga_Kim, lgotbangtan777, pocketbangtan, -haikutae, SEOKJESUS, and so many other accounts that really deserve a shoutout but I'm running out of my allotted word count.) BTS became a FanFiction hot list necessity on Wattpad.

In addition to all these things, something else interesting happened. Through the Clubs, I met people with similar interests in BTS, and we talked. About BTS, but as time went on, more than just BTS. A few of them I would even consider to be my friends, as we know talk off-Wattpad. (I know, I know – kids, be careful when talking to people on the internet! Remember that Wattpad can't help you if you speak to anyone you met online if you leave Wattpad!) Through my love of this certain Kpop group, I made friends with people all over the world. I have a global awareness beyond anything I've ever had before.

In recent months, I began rewriting that aforementioned BTS fanfiction. I have written much since that first one, and my writing has improved much in that time. Now, I have readers that are willing to give constructive criticism in every chapter, helping me improve my writing further than it has ever been before.

I wasn't always a fanfiction author. But now, I have discovered that amazing things can happen when you allow yourself to have some fun and interact with people that share similar interests as you. I found that I was able to communicate complex and often dark stories with strong meanings in ways that I would never have imagined before. Over the course of this summer, I have tried to maintain a close author-reader relationship in replying to comments, and it has been my most self-fulfilling time as an author.

So to my fellow ARMY around the world, I know that we as a fandom have had rather tumultuous times, and we are fast approaching some of our most difficult times as a fandom. But just remember why we're really here. Remember what made us interested in our Bangtan Boys, why we stayed.

And there could be another reason. Maybe, if you really think about it, we stayed for each other, and what we could do together.

How has your ARMY journey been so far?

S p o t l i g h t:
"Learn Korean Through K-Pop"
https://my.w.tt/xdTFKSJstQ
by AmbassadorsKO