[theqoo] (REDDIT) AREN'T YOU GUYS TIRED OF FOREIGNERS CLAIMING THEY'RE EITHER K-DRAMA OR K-POP FANS?

A provocative internet article with no real source reads, “My Goodness! Koreans are absolutely the worst!” and then some folks with profile pictures of K-pop idols start making posts that are basically nothing but “Korea… Korea… Korea… Korea… Korea…” They become obsessed with Korea and then attack Korea out of supposedly being embarrassed about Korea itself.

They go into the Instagram or TikTok accounts of ordinary Koreans, acting as if they know Koreans and Korean society, and interfere with people’s personal lives as if it's some drama. When an commoner couple announces that they’re having a baby, they immediately start talking about the birth rate. They even download videos of ordinary Korean citizens going about their lives and comment things like, “What in the world, everyone here looks so miserable. Koreans have no individuality.”

Then, when Koreans criticize something like the recent Hong Myeong-bo (t/n: Korean soccer coach) appointment, they complain that Koreans are criticizing the appointment without even understanding the context, saying, “Can Koreans really be this mentally ill? 😭” and “Koreans are seriously crazy.”

If they hate Korea so much, they should stop consuming Korean culture and stop paying attention to Korea. But then they say, “Koreans are so rac**t!” while going around causing a fuss and declaring boycotts, only to come back a few weeks later and binge Korean dramas on Netflix.

Foreigners also lecture Korean culture, saying things like, “You need to raise yourselves in the right direction.” But they don’t have the basic manners to mind their own business. Meanwhile, Koreans and other Asians are constantly being told things like, “Get a tan,” “Don’t use umbrellas,” “Don’t wear sunscreen,” and “Learn to love dark skin.” Korea and other East Asian countries have preferred fair skin as a beauty standard for thousands of years, and protecting your skin is a personal choice. Why should we change our standards to fit foreigners’ values? Isn’t that exactly the kind of cultural interference centered on Western values? Why is this kind of attitude treated as the “correct” one whenever the target is Korea or another East Asian country?

On this subreddit, there are also foreigners pretending to ask questions like, “Okay, you Koreans. Give me the answer I want. Show me your self-hatred.” They deliberately provoke people, and then some K-pop/drama fans only make the prejudice worse by eagerly responding to them.

Korean immigrants live as second-class citizens in white societies, and when they live there, they deny their Korean roots. But when Koreans in their home country post something on social media, they jump in with their fingers and mock them. On TikTok, they don’t realize that they’re actually helping people recognize them as “good Koreans” within those societies.

Nationalists say, “Well, isn’t it good that Korea is becoming famous?” But when K-pop’s overall profits increase, they follow the success story everywhere. Most Koreans are probably happiest when the cultural industry succeeds, just like they were happiest when the semiconductor industry was booming. So what is the point of foreigners becoming the idiots who hate Korea while consuming Korean culture?

Personally, I have no interest in K-pop, I don’t know any BTS members’ names, and I don’t particularly care for K-dramas starring men, so aside from the occasional case where I encounter these people in real life or on Instagram because I’m Korean, I’ve never really paid attention to them.

Have Japanese people really been putting up with this for decades? There’s a saying that “Korea’s current social problems are what Japan went through 10 years ago.” If so, just as Japanese people are supposedly getting annoyed by Vietnamese people, Indonesians, Muslims, etc. constantly liking their tweets, Korea will probably face the same thing in 10 years with xenophobia and antisocial behavior getting worse. But it seems like the 50 million people living in Korea would have to start confronting foreigners who deliberately try to provoke them.

- I understand reasonable criticism, but honestly, it’s not just one or two things that make no sense… It’s tiring to keep rebutting them. I think it’s healthier for your mental health to just look at it and think, “Oh, I see, that’s just how they are"

- But if you just leave it alone, the foreign idiots on Reddit keep getting worse and worse, like a pack of rabid dogs, so honestly, I’m not sure leaving them alone is necessarily a good idea.

Even on Reddit, just seven years ago, there were already a few foreigners spreading the nonsense that they were manipulating Korean political discourse. When you see this kind of absurd claim gradually becoming established as a sort of “orthodoxy” on Reddit and being used for the purpose of justifying hostility toward Korea, you can see why…

- Seriously, it’s so, so annoying. They act like Korea survives by feeding off K-pop or something, but even if everything related to the K-pop industry disappeared tomorrow, it would have absolutely no impact on my daily life.

- Don't you think there's been a lot more unfair bashing of Korea lately? If you look at the comments on any Korean Reels, they're all filled with comments like "she bleached her skin" or "she had plastic surgery." And lately, there's even been a controversy about people being discriminated against based on skin color, something I've never even heard of in my life. Seriously, what the... Just now, I saw a fake post on Reddit by a non-Korean claiming they were discriminated against in Korea because their skin was dark, so I got pissed off and wrote this post. How long do I have to put up with people who look like they've never even been to Korea writing hate posts about the country? I mean, this is so fg wrong.

original post: here

1. What on earth did we do to deserve this abuse? It’s sickening how they spend all day glued to their screens, just waiting for bad news about Korea

2. The I-roaches K-pop fans are the most problematic. They simultaneously act boy crazy, and they always feel some complex against Korean women 

3. I bet they're excited hearing what is happening with Jeju-do recently ㅋㅋㅋ

4. K-pop accounts for a really small portion of the Korean economy, and we are a country with world-class technological capabilities in shipbuilding, defense, and semiconductors, yet people act like K-pop is the whole country

5. At this rate, I've developed a prejudice against international K-pop fans. Especially HYBE's idols' fans 

6. It’s pitiful. No matter what they do, our people are so talented and hardworking that we’re developing even faster than their country, and our influence just keeps growing

7. Making fun of someone over their skin color is the most childish thingㅋㅋ Does having darker skin in Korea mean you can't get a job? Sure, making fun of someone for it is wrong, but what, unlike in other countries, does it mean you can't get into school, can't get a job, or can't get promoted? If celebrities say, “I’m kind of dark-skinned,” does that mean they can't get cast? Meanwhile they're going on about “true skin tone” and all kinds of sh*t like that ㅋㅋ Since we don't have any institutional discrimination based on skin color here, it's literally just teasing-level. Isn't it f**king ridiculous for people from countries where skin-color discrimination is extremely severe to have a meltdown claiming that Korea is discriminating against them? ㅋㅋ And it's not just about skin either. If the usual “bash Korea” crowd hadn't kept supplying material for people to feed on, things wouldn't have gotten this bad. Korean Japanophiles and Koreans living abroad have joined forces and spread this narrative as if Korea were the world's greatest dystopia: “Korea is inferior because of this,” “Korea collapsed because of that,” “That's why I left Korea,” and so on. All of that gets picked up as ammunition by Korea-haters, and then it gets spread everywhere. Fine, criticize Korea. I have no problem with that. But does blindly trashing your own country actually make your lives any better? Especially you overseas Koreans lol. These days you're walking around with your chests puffed out thanks to Korea's soft power, while constantly shitting on Korea

8. Acting like they know more than Koreans, even though they've never even been to Korea

9. People attack others because of their own complexes. Since they feel inferior about their own skin color, they project that onto Koreans and seethe with envy over Korean skin tones

10. We’re a country that survives on semiconductors. How much weight do these people think K-pop and K-dramas really carry in the grand scheme of things?

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