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I’ve been getting messages recently asking me why I stopped posting about BTS. The reason? While most fans are respectable and kind, I couldn’t deal with the minority of people who came to their own bad conclusions about my presence in this fandom.
People have called me a clout chaser. They’ve insisted that I’m not welcome in ARMY and demanded that I leave at once. I’ve been harassed in DMs. And the reasons vary. On one occasion, it was because I gave people the option of supporting my work on Patreon. I was putting
20+ hours per week into my news updates and YouTube videos, but a lot of people thought I should do that for free because other people do. I never explained that I was in a difficult financial situation and could have
used some extra cash, but I don’t know if that would have changed anything. Again, I was not forcing people to support me on Patreon; I was giving them the option to do. I later lost close to 10K followers for tweeting that I love Blackpink, and then noting how people
were unfollowing me. Could I have phrased some of my tweets better? Sure! I’d definitely do some things differently if I had decided to continue. But my intention has never been to upset anyone. I always tried to spread positivity in my work, and I think I was mostly successful.
But seeing people make up their own minds about my presence in this fandom, as though they know me and my motivations, and then watching others believe them and unfollow or block me, caused immense stress for me. Part of me wanted to respond to every single
wrong thing a person said, but another part of me knew that it didn’t matter how I responded. People had already decided I should be banished. Nothing I said could change that.
I know that in posting this, people may accuse me of playing the victim. Others may say I’m giving ARMY a bad name. The truth is that these same bad actors exist all over the internet. Ultimately, I decided that for me, gaining a social media following is just not worth it.
