What would it look like if critical work on Korean popular culture was actually grounded in love for its objects? What is the value of this cultural conversation for the wider global public—not just for fans but for the audiences beyond fandom? These were two of the questions that motivated the launch of MENT Magazine in August of 2024. Yin Yuan and I, co-editors and founders of MENT, developed the magazine to be an accessible yet rigorous digital venue for critical and creative work on South Korean popular culture. Its aim is to bring conversation on Korean media out of its often-siloed spaces and into the broader public sphere—to merge the fannish with the scholarly; adoration with critique. In this, we take seriously Henry Jenkins’ observation that “within the realm of popular culture, fans are the true experts,” as they “display a close attention to the particularity of [the content]” that can often outpace that of the detached academic. Against a history of scholarship on K-culture that has treated its media primarily as commodity, economic export, or flattened geopolitical flow, MENT takes up the fannish understanding of K-media objects as aesthetically and semantically rich: distinct objects capable of expanding into generative, and at times unexpected, discussions on culture, identity, and art.
MENT is also animated by the idea that Korean pop culture can tell us something about our contemporary moment. As Mimi Thi Nguyen notes in our first-issue interview with the editors of Bangtan Remixed: A BTS Critical Reader, Korean popular culture indexes not just the spectacle of pop celebrity but also the “histories of war and capital, and of racialized bodies”: the broader dynamics of capital, labor, geopolitics, and sociality. “What,” Nguyen asks, “does it look like when we engage these [racialized] bodies, or these cultures, through consumerism? What does it look like when we engage through building solidarities?”
As a fan myself, these questions have been at the forefront of my mind, particularly in light of the crisis and ongoing genocide in Palestine over the past year. If the fan’s strength, after all, lies in the capacity to consider media as more than just a commodity, then what alternate orientations to capitalism and its market objects are fans specifically able to reveal? Where does resistance to systems of oppression find fannish points of entry? And what is the responsibility of the fan in the face of global injustice?
ARMY for Palestine (A4P), the fan collective organizing within the BTS community in support of Palestine, is one of the groups in the K-fandom sphere offering concrete answers to these otherwise theoretical questions. As their activist work directs the power of K-pop fandom toward decolonial and liberatory ends, the collective makes a succinct but powerful argument for the dissolution of old binaries: of fan and critic, activist and consumer, viewer and participant. Far from distinct identities, A4P contends, the overlaps between these terms are not only active but increasingly urgent. ARMY for Palestine, in short, offers us a way forward on what organizing in fan spaces can, and perhaps should, look like in a moment of global crisis.
In tandem with A4P’s work, a collective of K-pop fans under the name “Boot The Scoot” organized a protest for Palestine that took place in March of 2024 outside of the Universal Production Music offices in Santa Monica, California. It was the first K-pop–specific, in-person protest to support Palestinian liberation, and the demands were clear: HYBE, BTS’s managing company, must cut its business ties with Scooter Braun, a Zionist music executive with a record of “actively supporting the colonial project of Israel,” primarily through propaganda, and “a growing reputation for unethical practice.” The informational materials circulated before the protest further state that Scooter Braun’s position as CEO of the US branch of HYBE operations (HYBE America) represents, for the South Korean company, an executive-level complicity in Israel’s “violence as an apartheid state” that “has displaced and killed Palestinians for nearly seven decades,” up to and including the violence that has devastated Gaza since October of last year.
The protest had already amassed about two dozen people when I arrived. It was a bright Friday afternoon, and the organizers immediately welcomed my friend and me into the fold. We were handed informational materials, offered water, and invited to take turns holding the Palestinian flag. The next few hours were spent chanting, marching up and down Colorado Avenue, ignoring the few detractors who shouted at us, and cheering with the many, many car honks in support—including one very memorable and enthusiastic ambulance.
As I marched with those few dozen fans, I couldn’t help but be reminded, quite viscerally, of the first time I ever attended an in-person ARMY event at the Highlight Tour in Houston in 2015. It had the same shocking transition from mediated connection and a digital screen to the sudden physicality of real life: of bodies, of voices, of three-dimensional movement with and against other people. Here, emergent and in the flesh, was a community of ARMY who had taken the discourse of online fandom as impetus to show up for in-person, community-oriented political work. And although the group was smaller than some other protests for Palestine I had attended in Los Angeles, this group felt not just welcoming but cohesive. These fans felt, yes, like political allies but also like potential friends: a group with the warmth of familiarity.
I know many people talk about meetups of people from fandom communities in this way—the experience of finally meeting mutuals at concerts, the solidarity of waiting in line with other fans—but I also know from experience just how often this community in fact fails to happen, how fan-to-fan interactions at events can get competitive, ugly, petty, or racist, just as easily as they can go well. In these times, the lack of political and personal value alignment decidedly interrupts the utopic political narratives so often told about ARMY and the fandom’s global force. Even now, ARMY’s social media spaces are marred by the ongoing harassment, doxxing, and obstructionism targeting fans who organize for Palestine—dynamics that powerfully dissolve the progressive narratives told about ARMY by media venues in the past. Today, in place of the formidable fan collective who broke through a xenophobic US music market and fundraised millions for social causes, we have a fractured, incoherent online ARMY community whose values are not only in question but, perhaps, in crisis.
Yet, precisely because the HYBE protest in Santa Monica emerged from a coherent political stance that went beyond the discursive—and because these politics informed everything about the gathering from its conception to its praxis—the event in Santa Monica felt like an articulation of what made ARMY such a powerful space to begin with. In fact, walking with my fellow protesters that day felt more genuinely relational for me than many recent BTS concerts have been, despite the ever-growing seas of coordinated ARMY lightsticks.
The most powerful argument for this same kind of value-driven ARMY identity in recent months has been the ARMY for Palestine collective (A4P). This group of Palestinian-led fan activists has been doing the sustained work of fundraising, protest, education, and organizing in HYBE’s online fandom spaces since October of 2023. A4P’s organizing work provided the backdrop against which the protest in Santa Monica emerged, and the political rigor they bring to the fandom keeps the spirit of that protest defiantly alive. Their leveraging of fandom as a collective force that can produce change has not only paved the way for the ARMY community this year but crafted a broader model for what organizing in fan spaces can, and perhaps should, look like at a time of global crisis.
A critical part of their efforts has been a material critique of HYBE for Scooter Braun’s presence in its executive ranks—one that has resulted in their call for a boycott of HYBE merchandise and music purchases. I say “material critique” here because A4P’s stance has not been to criticize HYBE simply for its proximity to Braun in a vague guilt-by-association way. Rather they have articulated a more specific and material rejection of the flow of artist revenue through Braun toward Zionist ends.
It has been the argument of some fans that Braun receives no revenue from BTS and has only become a target on the grounds of a general protest or dislike. But the flow of revenue from BTS-specific activities to Braun’s own profit is undeniable: in May of 2021, HYBE closed a deal with Braun that granted him personal HYBE shares valued at more than $103 million, in addition to what Forbes called “an undisclosed amount of cash” from HYBE to the producer. Just a year prior, BTS’s revenue represented no less than “87% of the KRW 290 billion ($260 million) Hybe reported for the first half of 2020,” making it difficult to argue that BTS’s (and other HYBE artists’) revenue has no material connection to Braun’s cash bonuses, share profits, and other undisclosed CEO benefits. In fact, the 2022 announcement of a military-service “hiatus” for BTS sharplydevalued HYBE’s stock by 28%—equal to an overall decrease of $1.7 billion in HYBE’s market value—and prompted a backpedaling statement from the company to placate shareholder fears of losing BTS-specific revenue during the enlistment period. Market dynamics like these reveal that BTS’s earnings are, in fact, critical to HYBE—to its shareholders, its management, and its monetary power. Understanding this reality, A4P’s call for a boycott seeks to interrupt the company’s investments of artist-generated revenue in figures like Scooter Braun, who uses those resources in turn to support Zionist propaganda and do anti-Palestinian work.
AliceSparklyKat’s uncompromising observations from earlier this year echo this structural concern. They position BTS’s management as playing a central, rather than peripheral, role in the moral conversation at hand:
Fans are drawn to BTS because of the group’s messages about grief, about injustice, and about friendship. Now, Palestinian ARMY are dying. This is an injustice. These are our friends. I know that BTS wrote Spring Day because they care when young people are killed by unjust systems. And, still, fans are dying.
A manager is someone who is supposed to manage the relationship between a celebrity and their fans. For BTS and ARMY, who is in charge of managing the relationship between young people who are dying and those who claim to speak for them?
SparklyKat’s location of the managerial as a mediating and material force, rather than a symbolic, abstract, or invisible idea, reaches to the heart of A4P’s protest. A4P understand, like SparklyKat does, that when we talk about a HYBE boycott, we are talking about financial complicity in unjust systems. We are not talking about symbolic gestures of support, nor are we speaking theoretically or abstractly. We are talking about where the money goes, and to whom. We are talking about the ways individual purchases always move with or against wider systems—whether we want them to or not, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Under this rubric, the protesters know that BTS’s managerial ties are a part of BTS’s material impact on the world. The fantasy of a pure or direct artist-fan relationship may be compelling or seductive, but such fantasies ignore the corporate structure to which BTS belongs and through which the money must always move. This corporate structure is not secondary or auxiliary to the members but one that mediates the scope of their monetary impact. The executives of HYBE, in other words, are not a vague afterthought located somewhere to the side of BTS but the frame within which they move.
To protest the managerial work of Scooter Braun and to boycott HYBE, then, is ultimately a pressure strategy with a clear goal: disrupt the flow of money toward Zionist ends. Leverage fans’ purchasing power to redirect financial resources away from use against Palestinian liberation. Use the loss of revenue to send a message to HYBE. The debates that attend this kind of protest in fan spaces (Does this mean protesters don’t support the members? What about other groups or companies? What about donating elsewhere or using other strategies instead?) are often symbolic distractions that miss the fundamentally material point: to cut off fans’ personal investments in HYBE so long as HYBE is structurally complicit with ongoing violence.
This refusal is pragmatic. It is uninterested in the stan-culture logic of declaring loyalty or hate, of virtue signaling, or of fanwars for one group over another. The refusal simply withholds money from a managerial system invested in harm.
A4P’s work on this and other initiatives has been both thankless and tireless, yet it is also some of the most important work coming from the ARMY fandom today. To get a more detailed—and personal—perspective on how this work has been carried out, I spoke with one of the Palestinian administrators of A4P at length on a Saturday afternoon this past May. We discussed the origins of the A4P project, its intentions, and the work they have done thus far. The full interview is available in MENT Magazine here.
Andrea Acosta is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College and founding co-editor of MENT Magazine