The Face Painter vs the K-Pop Stan

While doing some research for an upcoming episode discussing Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the idol connection will make sense so stay tuned!) I was reading some contemporaneous writing on the show and something caught my eye. In a book on the Buffy online fandom titled Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby (2007), author Allyson Beatrice says this [emphasis added]: 

“Past the age of four, it suddenly becomes unacceptable and weird to dress up as an elf, or fashion a cape out of an old blanket and pretend to “fly” down the sidewalk. It stops being cute at some point. However, it is acceptable for a fifty-two year old man to paint a bull’s-eye on his giant gut and jiggle it while naked from the waist up in twenty-degree weather behind the goal post at a Packers game, while wearing a giant wedge of cheese on his head. People may point and laugh, but they’re laughing with him. It’s acceptable. He’s a Great Big Fan Displaying Team Spirit! People like me think the painted Packers fan is a jackass, but we wouldn’t dare confront him. He’s probably drunk and angry about something.”

This is an argument I’ve seen parroted again and again not just from genre fiction fans but also from boy band fans and other K-Pop fans looking to justify their over-the-top and obsessive fandom behaviors. 

Leaving aside the stereotyping of the enthusiastic sports fan as a drunken lout (they’re definitely out there but there are plenty more who are perfectly nice people, drunk and sober) let me offer a reality-based counterpoint. There’s an episode of Seinfeld called “The Face Painter” in which Elaine discovers (to her horror) that her boyfriend Puddy paints his face when he attends Jersey Devils’ games.

“You can’t walk around like that,” says Elaine. 

“Why not?” asks Puddy.

“Because… it’s insane?!” answers Elaine.

Elaine (and the gang) are stand-ins for the average person. The Face Painter is the equivalent of the person who goes in full cosplay to a screening of a new Star Wars film or the K-Pop fan decked out head to toe in pins and patches and merch at a concert. You might get a kick out of seeing them at the event but standing in line with them at a Starbucks on a Monday morning in full fan regalia is a different thing altogether. It’s not embarrassing to be a giant fan but it is embarrassing to be an adult who doesn’t understand that there is a time and a place for certain fan behaviors.

The Great Big Fan Displaying Team Spirit has his place in the stadium; not so much outside of it. The same goes for the Great Big Fan Wearing a Star Fleet Uniform and the Great Big Fan Displaying Boy Band Love. 

Spend any time around people who like sports or engage with sports fans and you’ll quickly understand both the similarities and differences between sports and the vast world of more feminine-coded fandoms like Buffy and K-Pop. 

Unfortunately the denizens of the more feminine-coded fandoms rarely understand the analogies they’re trying to use. Like the author of Vampire People and like the author of a recent piece in Fansplaining on being a “fan journalist” in which she has this to say [emphasis added]: 

“Within many corners of entertainment journalism, it’s not cool to be a fan, and I often downplay the degree to which I identify as one. There’s an assumption that fannishness can create a bias that gets in the way of objectivity, of telling the true or whole story; there’s also the widespread perception of “fan” as “booster,” totally incapable of critique of their faves. I think there is merit to those concerns, as there is when it comes to any potential conflict of interest—but I think it’s levied too often against women journalists in particular, where it’s often treated as a given rather than a possibility. (Note that no one questions whether sports reporters are also fans of the game they cover—and probably even an individual team!)”

I’ve devoted a lot of ink and air time to my concerns with the “fan journalists,” “fan critics,” and “fan academics” that clutter up the K-Pop sphere so I won’t rehash them here. Let’s stick to sports for the moment—is it true “no one questions whether sports reporters are also fans of the game they cover--and probably even an individual team!”

Reporters (and commentators) need to be well versed in the game they cover because their audiences will waste no time in hopping online to ream them out if they get something wrong. Usually that does involve loving the sport. Some sports commentators are former athletes and coaches—from figure skater Johnny Weir to ex-NFL player turned coach John Madden.  Other sports reporters and commentators, like Vin Scully, devoted their lives to understanding and following the game they cover. 

If a K-Pop Vin Scully or John Madden—let alone a K-Pop Johnny Weir—has appeared in the English language market, I have yet to encounter them. (Maybe someone like Eric Nam or Tablo is the closest we have?)

There are two big differences between K-Pop and sports that our “fan journalist” is either ignorant of or deliberately overlooking.

1. There are absolutely “homer” sports journalists who report sports news that is biased towards a particular team or market. The difference is that the market for homer news of  a team like the Boston Red Sox dwarfs the potential market for homer news coverage of a particular K-Pop artist or company. The home attendance for the Boston Red Sox in 2023 was 2.67 million people. Even if you added up all the shows from a single company in a big K-Pop market like Los Angeles for a single year, you aren’t hitting anywhere close to 2.67 million people. 

Unless you are the lucky soul who was hired to be what is essentially a “homer” reporter for Taylor Swift—the only artist coming close to hitting major league sports attendance numbers—there simply isn’t the market demand for homer K-Pop (or other music reporters) jobs the way there is for major sports teams. That’s not misogyny, that’s basic market economics. 

English language “K-Pop” has had room for exactly one (1) freelance journalist to make a career as a dedicated K-Pop “homer” and it’s Jeff Benjamin. Unless the market really explodes overnight, I don’t see that changing in the near future. Right now North American-based K-Pop coverage in English doesn’t even have enough demand to sustain a “fan journalist” platform like SB Nation. 

You can’t blame mainstream normie outlets for not wanting to publish homer pieces on various groups when there will be very little payoff in clicks unless it’s hate clicks accompanied by a barrage of rape and death threats. 

2. The market for sports in North America is estimated at 83.1 billion dollars. That’s billion with a B, just in North America. That’s not counting the tens (even hundreds!) of billions from other global sports like the Olympics, the World Cup, English Premier League (soccer/football), the Indian Premier League (cricket), and so on. 

In contrast, the global K-Pop events market value is estimated at 8.9 billion dollars. Global. I couldn’t find a number breaking out the North American part of that which alone should tell us something. And music exports to the USA clocked in at 25 million dollars. Million with an M.

What am I getting to here? The market for sports dwarfs the market for K-Pop by many, many orders of magnitude—both monetarily and by audience share. This means that the aspiring “fan journalist” is going to have much, much easier time selling homer coverage of even a shitshow of a team like the Washington Commanders than they would selling homer coverage of one of the biggest K-Pop groups right now. 

Again, I’ve gone on record that almost all coverage of K-Pop in English these days is pure garbage, outside of the occasional music critic who knows their stuff or the straightforward news of an outlet like Soompi. Are there better quality stories out there that just aren’t getting published? It’s possible. But my suspicion is that it’s more likely than not that mainstream outlets realized the market for boy group-hagiography pieces has dwindled to almost nothing and it’s not worth the death and rape threats to publish them. 

To go back to my sports analogy, I have yet to see any critical coverage of Hybe from any homer Hybe group journalist that approaches the critical coverage of the Commanders in their hometown paper, The Washington Post.

Sports reporting certainly isn’t perfect and there are sports reporters who are just as tied to access journalism as most K-Pop reporters are. The difference, I think, is that sports fans overall are savvier consumers of media and there are far, far, far more casual sports consumers (myself included) who may browse the daily headlines than there are casual K-Pop news consumers. I can honestly say I think I’ve gone to more professional sports games over the last few years than I have K-Pop concerts and I would consider myself a much bigger K-Pop “fan” than sports “fan”. 

But even if mainstream outlets won’t touch it, music fandom (which K-Pop is merging with) still appears as a juicy target. And just as the sports market attempts to engage fans with things like the “Comic Con for Sports,” the music industry is using sports fans as a template for monetization. I was not surprised to see Billboard offering what is essentially fantasy sports but for the music charts. Can a chart-based betting app be far behind? 

Tom Breihan wrote in his (excellent) book, The Number Ones: 

“Apparently, the Hot 100 is no longer a historical record of the music that dominates pop culture at any particular moment. Instead, the charts look more and more like a battlefield for competing fan armies. A change like that forces a reconsideration of the entire idea of pop stardom. BTS have taken the existing model and blown it up like dynamite.” (pp. 310-311)

The question is, now that the charts have been blown up, is there a big enough market interested in following the battle of fan armys to continue to provide jobs to aspiring fan music journalists? Or maybe the freelancers following fantasy sports will have a better shot at this new market.