#3 - The Unpaid Labor of Fandom
K-Pop fandom is serious business and fans play a huge, active part in it.
Hello,
How are you this Sunday? I’d like to apologize again that this newsletter isn’t shipped at 10 am as I intended. I’m still experimenting with writing, editing, and publishing schedule. I want to turn this into a routine habit of mine. So please bear with me while I fine-tune this project. I will do my best to ship a letter every Sunday.
Before we start, I have a couple of announcements. I discussed “Buyan” and my creative process in Podca’s podcast. You can listen to it here:
My first book, “Magical Tales of Gandaloka: Welcome to the Fandom” is also celebrating its second anniversary. We’re having a huge sale. These books most likely won’t be reprinted, so once it’s sold out, that’s it. We’re selling these books by ourselves, so we’d appreciate your patience while we ship the book to you. You can order your copy here.
Now let’s get on to this week’s memoir. It’s slightly longer than usual, but I hope you’ll enjoy it all the same. Let me know if you like it!
Have a great Sunday!
The year was 2009, and K-entertainment was far from the mainstream psyche. Normies were blissfully ignorant, while K-Pop stans had to scour the dark corners of the internet for pirated content; subbed by fans, from fans, and for fellow fans. Indonesia was a third world developing country that was far from being a sexy market. If you wanted to see your K-idols, you had to fly abroad in addition to going to war for limited tickets. That was the year I discovered Super Junior (abbreviated SuJu).
The experience was shocking. I'd never seen a boyband that big. There were thirteen good-looking boys in the group. Later, when I dug even deeper, I learned that there were actually fifteen good-looking boys of the group. I thought, this must be the biggest boyband in the world. They were promoting Sorry, Sorry, such an earworm of a song, I couldn't hate it even if I tried to. The song was groovy enough to dance to, the hook was catchy, and I had no idea what they were singing so I could just enjoy the music. But the real kicker was their variety shows.
SuJu were top comedians disguised as music performers. I fell from my chair laughing watching their variety shows. There was Explorers of the Human Bodies, where they educated you about human anatomies and did funny experiments with their bodies. That show was legendary and I wish they'd rerelease it in super HD. There was Full House, where they hosted two foreigners and tripped over themselves from the language barrier. There was Super Junior Mini Drama, where they would make and act in their own drama, and it was so bad it's good. Television was saturated with western content, and I never saw this kind of quality entertainment before. I was smitten.
Before long, I met a few friends in campus who were also into SuJu. There were only four of us but it was enough. A couple of them were my seniors. They'd liked SuJu and K-Pop long before I did. They taught me everything about SuJu. Apparently they worked under an agency called SM Entertainment. They had so many members, the group had a bunch of sub-units: Super Junior KRY for ballads, Super Junior T for trots (think of it as the dangdut of South Korea), Super Junior M for Mando-pop promoting in China, Super Junior H for cute & funny songs, and later they'd add Super Junior D&E (a subunit of two of their popular members). They had a bunch of loyal fans called ELF, which stands for Everlasting Friends. They were my first insight into the dark world of K-Pop fandoms, and boy was I surprised.
Out of the 15 members, three were Chinese: Hangeng, Zhoumi, and Henry. Hangeng was a primary member in the main group of 13 members, while Zhoumi and Henry were additions in SuJu-M. Hangeng had had to face his own kind of public resistance, being Chinese in Korea and all; but Zhoumi and Henry faced a different kind of backlash altogether. Some ELF were very protective of the main group, they explicitly rejected Zhoumi's and Henry's presence in SuJu. Those ELF tried to buy SM Entertainment's public stocks in an attempt to influence the expulsion of Zhoumi and Henry from the group. I was mindblown. I didn't know fans could do that! So I got into SuJu, its fandom, and K-Pop with this mixed feelings of admiration, awe, horror, and disgust.
Through Twitter, my friends and I met another SuJu fan, an Indonesian studying in Australia. The five of us became fast friends because we didn't know anybody else who liked SuJu as much as we did. Social media wasn't like today. Distance still mattered back then. We couldn't relate to K-culture nor to the existing international SuJu fanbase at the time, SJ-World, which was a fan-forum with restricted access depending on how active you were in it. And that was the history of the creation of TwELFs, which stands for Twitter ELFs. A Twitter-based blog updates on everything about Super Junior. We posted and translated the latest SuJu videos, pictures, and news for all ELF to enjoy. They only needed to click. It was novel and convenient in the K-Pop sphere, we had a meteoric rise worldwide. In our peak, we had almost 100,000 followers during the time when only celebrities and blue-checkmark accounts had such numbers. My world suddenly got bigger. I had international friends now.
TwELFs became a key opinion leader for the fandom then, and we were butting heads with the elites of SJ-World, whose founders were two white French and Italian women. In hindsight, it was all very silly and juvenile, but we meant business at the time. We at TwELFs felt like we got something to prove. SJ-World probably didn't care much about us since they were older and bigger. 😂
Nonetheless, I enjoyed what we did in and for the fandom very much. I drank the recognition readily and did my best to keep my power trip in check. It was my first time being in such a position of influence and at that scale. We made it a point to be a reliable source of news (we didn't post rumors) to maintain our goodwill to fellow fans, and I think people liked us for it. TwELFs got bigger and bigger exposure, and eventually it led us to industry players.
Through TwELFs, I met an even older and longer K-Pop stan than I was. She had been a fan since the first generation of K-Pop (SuJu was second generation). Let's just call her the Insider Friend. She had a network of Indonesian and Korean industry players. At the time, it was normal for fans to bring gifts to K-Pop concerts. Most of the time they'd throw the gifts to the stage, and you'd be lucky if the idols picked them up. It would be better if you knew someone on the inside who could actually deliver the gifts right to the idols' hands. My Insider Friend was that person. She helped us shortening this figurative distance between us and SuJu. There was a time in 2009 or 2010 (can't really remember), we asked her to deliver a handmade scrapbook telling the history of TwELFs and how many fans they had on Twitter. Not long after that, each SuJu member started opening their own Twitter accounts. You have to understand, this was a time when K-Pop didn't touch American social media at all; they had their own local social media in Korea. Was it because of TwELFs? Who knows.
But we were having a field day. We now had a direct communication line to SuJu boys themselves. More ELF got onto Twitter and followed TwELFs. SJ-World even started to post their updates on Twitter. And remember when I said if you wanted to see your K-idols you had to fly abroad and went to war for tickets? Eventually TwELFs, working with the Insider Friend, took that role as well. The term jastip wasn't even invented yet. But we helped fans to get tickets. And we did all without taking a single cent of uang capek. It was all for our fellow fans. We were prioritizing our integrity. But I think we were also a bit crazy.
When the Insider Friend was bringing SuJu's Super Show 4 tour to Jakarta, it was only natural she asked us to help her with tickets. It felt like such an honor. It was the ultimate kind of recognition; we were fans elevated to actually contribute to the business in the industry. Yeah, I was easily impressed.
Those days, smartphones weren't like today and mobile apps were still far away from our daily interaction. RajaKarcis was the reigning ticket box. Most people still preferred to buy their tickets offline because internet connection was unreliable. My Insider Friend wanted all SuJu fans across Indonesia to have equal opportunity to get tickets. She couldn't rely solely on RajaKarcis, which was relatively available for Jabodetabek residents. She was thinking of the fans who didn't have bank accounts nor reliable internet connection. And that's where TwELFs came in. Together with Sujunesia, an Indonesian SuJu forum, we were to be a ticket box for non-Java residing fans. They would email us to book tickets and transfer the payment to my personal bank account.
We sold thousands of tickets. Manually.
It was 2012, I was 22 and fresh out of law school. I barely had any job experience. I relied on my organizing system and tendency to run this project. But I really didn't know what I was signing up for. It was insane.
We got orders from all corners of Indonesia. I think the farthest was from Kupang. Those Kupang ELF got together to make one big, single transaction for the lot of them, because not all of them had the bank accounts to send money. So they trusted 1-2 coordinators to buy the tickets from us. Later they would travel from Kupang to Jakarta and charter a bus just for them. They stuck together through everything. It was beautiful.
But not all of it was as heartwarming. The tickets were hot items. It birthed scalpers everywhere. Fans were desperate to get the tickets and we were concerned of bad people taking advantage of them. Many claimed to be insiders and that they sold original tickets, but how were fans to know the truth? The Insider Friend was monitoring everything closely. She knew exactly all the people she authorized to provide tickets. We did everything we could to remind the fans of official ticket boxes, and that they should be careful about where they bought their tickets from. But desperate fans are desperate fans. Even when ShowMaxx Entertainment, the promoter, added two additional concert days, making it a total of three concerts, Friday to Sunday, people were still going to scalpers.
I was really surprised when an acquaintance, let’s call her Fifi, announced she was selling tickets to the show and the price was slightly more expensive than the original ones. I knew Fifi through my activities on TwELFs. She was a mother and a house wife. I loved knowing that you could still fangirl at that age. I thought we had a good low-key friendship. So I asked her where she got her tickets from because I was concerned she was duped. But she insisted she had a trustworthy source. I told her it was impossible, because every authorized seller was internally accounted for. Fifi said I should mind my own business, so I stepped back. Fine, I got my own shit to handle anyway.
And my shit was only getting shittier. We were dealing with thousands of spreadsheet rows, because I didn't know how to automate back in the day. My account balance ballooned to billions of rupiah overnight, I was quite afraid somebody from PPATK would come knocking on my door asking about the money. Furthermore, the money was too much to transfer over internet banking. I had to visit the teller and withdraw my money. Remember I had thousands of transactions on my account? The teller had to close their table just to deal with printing my bank book because it was taking forever. I had to change books two-three times before I got all my money. Then I had to bring everything to a state-owned bank, to put it in ShowMaxx’s account. All the while, I was holding all the money in my bag. For the life of me, I can't remember why it wasn't possible to wire the money between banks, maybe there was an amount limit. But good god it was scary as fuck.
When the concert week arrived, I was relieved; because it meant that I didn't have to deal with banks anymore. Now I just needed to deal with ticket exchanges. The fans had to show us their proof of purchase and IDs. Once they're verified, we would give them their tickets. It was supposed to be that easy.
The concert was to be held in Mata Elang Indoor Stadium (MEIS) at Ancol. Indonesia Convention Exhibition (ICE) BSD City was still faaar from the imagination. MEIS was the biggest venue we had that could contain 10,000 people and that had the space for all the stage rigging a K-Pop concert required. MEIS was also barely finished.
My friends and I got to MEIS and saw an unfinished and unpainted construction. Was it even safe for thousands of people? I didn't have time to think about it because we had to work. They took some spots in the unfinished parking building for the ticket exchange. It was hot, humid, and wet. They put up huge standing fans, but it wasn't helping. We just needed to get this over with as people made long, long lines to get their tickets. It was supposed to be quick. But the tickets weren't ready.
It was a nightmare. The tickets were in the form of paper wristbands differentiated by colors for each seating section (the cheapest ticket got the farthest seat). Those wristbands were still being printed. I was horrified. Appointing myself as runner. I went back and forth between TwELFs & Sujunesia exchange table to RajaKarcis one, where the wristbands were. Their queue lines were just as long as ours. We had to split the available wristbands between us to make sure everyone got what they bought for. During lunch break, we went to our hotel (they gave us one room, twin beds, for the five of us) and we were busy allocating wristbands to make the exchange as quick as possible. I was tired, but I was with friends. I had a promoter ID, and I got to see the three-day concert without paying anything. And the huge bonus was EXO-M.
SM Entertainment had just debuted a new 12-member group at the time, EXO. They were divided into EXO-K for the international and South Korea market, and EXO-M for the China market. They had superpower concept and made neat designs for each member, representing their individual powers. I was really into that shit. My favorite was EXO-M; and they were coming to Super Show 4 Jakarta as an opening act. Two shows for the price of one? Menang banyak, really.
So I persevered. Through the heat of the parking lot and the complaints from queueing fans, I persevered. Even when I found out RajaKarcis double booked a whole section of seats, which ended up with one group of people not getting the seats they bought for, I persevered. I tried my best to explain to them and apologized for the system glitch. They took their shit on me, I persevered. The concert day came and I thought this disaster must be ending soon.
Nope, it only got worse. MEIS membludak with thousands of fans: those who were coming to see the concert, those who tried to find cheap tickets, those who tried to sell tickets, those who sold bootlegged merchandise, and those who tried their luck in catching a glimpse of SuJu and EXO-M. The venue was not finished and it was simply not prepared to host so many people. Some of them are lining up to exchange tickets, some were looking for food and toilets, others were lining up to get into the front rows of the concert hall. In the beginning, I had hoped that my promoter ID would allow me to see SuJu backstage. But that day, such hope was gone. I think by then I was moving on autopilot. I needed to deliver these tickets before the show started. Some of my friends who came on D-Day to see the concert even ended up helping us. Bless them and the kindness of their hearts.
Among the crowd, I saw Fifi. I came to her to say hi. I asked if she was getting her tickets just fine. She was surrounded by her buyers, waiting for their respective tickets. She was cold to me, saying she was waiting for her guy to deliver the tickets. I was still really worried she got duped, because I checked and rechecked with the Insider Friend about where Fifi could possibly get her tickets from, especially when there were only two official ticket boxes. Fifi still insisted she had real tickets. So I left her and returned to my own work.
It was a mess, but we did it. We exchanged the tickets before the show started. There was no more people queueing on TwELFs and Sujunesia's table. We tidied up and flashed our ID to hurry inside. We were working, but we wanted to see the concert too. First and foremost, we were fans doing this for free, so other fans could enjoy this concert as well.
And the concert was amazing. It was everything I liked about a K-Pop concert that ruined all other concerts for me. It was a three-hour show of singing, dancing, and laughter. There were pyrotechnics, wire-strapped flying, filmed sketch, beautiful costumes, beautiful men, and the hall was singing together. One of the special things about K-Pop is the fanchant, where the singers would sing something and the fans would reply with their own coordinated shout outs. ELF raised their lightsticks high, coloring the hall sapphire blue (SuJu's official color). It was cathartic and an experience like no other. I had never felt so much joy from being a part of a group. It was ecstasy.
Here’s a short clip from Super Show 7S to give you a picture of what the concert’s like:
The first concert wrapped up and we returned to our hotel giddy from excitement. We were exhausted from work and the show, but we stayed up all night to recall exciting moments of the concert. We were running on adrenaline, we had to force ourselves to go to sleep. The next day, we woke up, and lived the nightmare all over again.
I didn't think it was possible, but there were even more people the next day. Word about the show traveled fast and fans were still high from it. Those who initially wanted to see only one concert returned to MEIS to see it again. Those who failed to get in on the first day got even more desperate to see the concert. But the ticket exchange didn't get better. Wristbands distribution was still a mess. And I was being stretched really thin. I still enjoyed the second-day concert, but inside I was waiting for tomorrow when all of this would end.
On the third day, we checked out from the hotel. I only had one backpack on me, but it felt heavy on my shoulders. We plowed our way through the endless exchange queue and wristband distribution. This was the last day. After this, we wouldn't have to do this again. After the last ticket was given, we left our table and went to the concert hall. My heavy backpack was on me because they didn't assign TwELFs and Sujunesia a room where we could put our stuff. So we brought our bags with us. My shoulders were heavy. I just wanted to sit down, but the hall was packed. When the show started, all lights and fireworks, I cried. I was so tired, I cried. I didn't care about the concert anymore. I just wanted to lie down. I went through the whole concert in a state of exhaustion. I was a crying zombie. The whole thing didn't end up with a bang. At least not for me. I just wanted to go home.
I wished it ended there, but it didn’t. The aftermath was full of people complaining over the poor organization of the show. TwELFs and Sujunesia, being the front face and ticket box, also took some heat. We had to publish a joint statement explaining our non-position within the promoter’s body, and how we did our best to serve ELF with the limited facilities that we got. Some were grateful for us, some still hated us. We were just tired.
Later, I was looking for Fifi. I wanted to know how she was doing and whether she managed to get into the concert. But Fifi had disappeared. I heard she couldn’t deliver the tickets she promised to her buyers. I could tell her ‘I told you so’, but I was just sad. I hope she managed to work it out with her buyers.
It was a thankless job, being a fandom organizer. Many things happened, but Super Show 4 Jakarta had its role in my leaving the SuJu fandom. By then it was clear to me that I only stayed because of my friends. I didn't enjoy SuJu as much anymore. I was more into SHINee and EXO-M anyway. I still helped my friends in TwELFs, but I stopped following any SuJu updates. Eventually, I stopped being active in TwELFs altogether.
Despite the mess, Super Show 4 Jakarta was a proof of concept. It was a huge success with almost 36,000 people in attendance at a time when K-Pop was not even promoting in Indonesia. Our Insider Friend was invigorated. She was on a campaign to show South Korea that they should definitely hold concerts here. She would bring them all to Jakarta. New promoters popped up left and right, wanting to cash in on the phenomenon. But our Insider Friend had the upper hand. She quickly followed up with SMTOWN Live Tour III in Jakarta. In the same year of 2012. She and W Production brought the whole SM Entertainment artist roster to Gelora Bung Karno stadium, and the show was attended by 50,000 fans. And she didn't stop there.
After Super Show 4, ShowMaxx was slated to be the go-to K-Pop promoter in Jakarta. But they fucked up. They ran away with Super Show 4 money and only got caught in 2013 (go here and search for “Sherwin Djajadi”). Our Insider Friend looked for other reliable promoters until one day she decided to establish her own promoter business. She kept bringing in K-Pop concerts and events over and over again.
She still asked me to help her with tickets. We did have a working system going on. My presence was really helping fans without internet connection or credit cards. I was happy to get the promoter ID and to watch the concert for free. But I learned my lesson and worked out a commission-based fee for every ticket I sold. This was becoming a business to me and I didn't want to use TwELFs name for it. Despite being a thankless job, I still believe fandom should be a non-profit space. Besides, I was selling tickets for artists other than SuJu as well.
Eventually I and a couple of friends from TwELFs created FanTix to host our ticket box. We had a blast for a few years. We got see all the K-Pop concerts. And the commission money brought me to watch SHINee's concert in Seoul. But alas, technology caught up, and we were just passionate fans with no coding expertise after all. At one point, purchasing tickets at FanTix was more of a hassle than buying them online at a digital ticket box. FanTix faded away from existence, and so did my enthusiasm in SuJu and EXO-M.
TwELFs also slowly, and suddenly, stopped updating. As smartphones got better, internet got faster, fans also got better at looking for their own updates. Fan-forums and fan-blogs became archaic. Second generation fans grew up and became full-time working adults. Regeneration happened naturally.
From the vantage point of 2012, the K-Pop landscape in 2021 is unrecognizable. I honestly feel like a has-been writing this memoir. A lot has happened in the last decade. SuJu is now a 9-member group. The Chinese members got out, deciding the hate was just not worth it anymore; one member got out of the K-Pop industry, one got into DUI and assault cases, and one got married. There are no longer EXO-K and EXO-M, only one group of EXO. Three Chinese members of EXO-M got out, one of which is recently jailed for sexual assault. The other Chinese member is busy making it rain in China; while another member is a father and a husband, and is currently enlisting in the military.
I only have SHINee now, and they came with its own set of drama. I fell in love with SHINee so easily, I knew I wanted to stay liking them. I didn’t want to drift apart from SHINee the way I did with SuJu and EXO. So when it comes to SHINee, I make it a point to just be a fan. I am going to enjoy them and the fandom as a fan. I am not going to organize anything whatsoever for the SHINee fandom; because really, it’s fulfilling, but it's a thankless job.