a founded soul

I know I made several of these posts but this is now serious. On March 2025 after going to Taemin’s London show and had the greatest time ever, I finally felt like it would be the best time to close my chapter with SHINee as my ult K-pop group.

While it was due to constant harassment and having to deal with people bringing up Jonghyun’s you know what, it wasn’t really just that.

For the past 16 months, I’ve been getting off social media in hopes to better my mental health due to whole situation causing me to deteriorate and disallow me to move on effectively. While I did meet some Shawols in person and I had the greatest time ever, even being able to chat to the most wonderful Shawols who were so understanding of my situation and took me in with open arms, I’ve also realised that this situation caused me to be in a mindset where I felt like I had to fit in with the other Shawols and lie about who I was including how long I’ve been a Shawol due to the fact that some of the people that were harassing me were those who were unfortunately proclaimed Shawols. And the worst of all, all I could listen to was Generation 2 and 3 K-Pop groups, and wouldn’t allow myself to get into other groups no matter when they debuted.

The group that broke that mould for me was ATEEZ. I’ve always loved them ever since 2020, but at that point I wasn’t actively stanning them. However, from 2024 after the release of Work I started checking them out as well as going to cupsleeve events. They were almost like a safe haven for me whenever I wanted to take a break from SHINee for a while. I went to their day 2 London show on the 28th of January 2025 as advised from the Atinys I met from the events I went to and I enjoyed myself so much that I decided to buy a last minute ticket to their Manchester show despite me possibly getting in trouble by my parents and me never been to Manchester before since it was far away. That what led me to realise that ATEEZ were my new ultimate bias group and has replaced SHINee’s place after couple of years.

It was no longer just a place for me to go after a while, it was my new home. And even though I had the greatest experience at the Taemin concert where I managed to stand in line where I was able to see him come out from his taxi, managed to be second to barricade and got noticed by Taemin during his Pansy performance, I just knew that it was the best moment to finally end my chapter with SHINee after 3 and almost a half years of service, so it could be on a good note.

I feel much more welcome in the ATEEZ fandom. I don’t feel like I’m constantly walking on eggshells and instead I’m able to talk about my bias in peace without having to worry about making anyone uncomfortable, having to change the topic, having to go into debates, or anything of the sort. I can just be treated normally, and that was the point.

And of course, SHINee released Poet | Artist which I haven’t heard yet due to its heavy themes, but I’m seeing people talk about it like it’s nothing. Due to that, I haven’t been interacting with any SHINee content since I’m not ready to listen to Poet | Artist yet. I will eventually, just not right now at this moment.

I’m currently looking forward to ATEEZ’s comeback and I’m noticing that I have a much easier time listening to it — possibly because it doesn’t contain something I’m sensitive about. Either way, I tend to find it harder listening to SHINee’s new music and it doesn’t help that I’ve been mocked over the fact that I openly said that I didn’t want to listen to them right now and I’m taking my time with it. This is mostly the reason why I don’t interact with Shawols online anymore, especially on Tiktok.

I just wanted a space to talk about how I’m doing so apologies for not making an update but I’m doing alright. I’m starting to deal with Jonghyun’s you know what better now that I’m not needing to deal with it being shoved down my throat every week or couple of days. I’m doing so much better, I’m interacting with other people and I’m glad to say that I have a safety net now. I have people that I can talk to if I’m dealing with stuff.

All I can say is… thank you for being there for me when I was dealing with stuff. I’m not sure if anyone has been reading my posts, but making posts has been my safe space since I barely had people to talk to at that time. Now that I do, I don’t really make posts all that much, especially now I’ve been on Tiktok speaking up about the mistreatment Shawols have to go through, especially if they are Jonghyun stans. My videos have been doing very well, so I am so grateful that I could use my experiences to get others to talk about theirs or just to speak up and realise that this isn’t ok.

i’m definitely trans, but i don’t feel trans masc. i like the idea of being a girl, but not in a cis way. i identified as a nonbinary person, but it feels like it doesn’t tell the full picture. then i switched to demigirl, which is the closest thing to being able to tell anyone that asks.

i just learned about afab transfems and i never thought it was something that i could be included in, until i read about trans neutral. it feel better to say than trans masc, but it still doesn’t feel 100% me. so afab transfem is the label i most resonate with.

growing up, i had a complicated relationship with my femininity and my girlhood. it was taken away from me at 11 years old, and i’m still paying the price as an adult. not speaking too much about it, but i never got to go to school growing up and was humiliated and mocked by staff members, which may have contributed to why i came out as a trans man. i felt like i was kicked out of girlhood, unable to experience the teenage girl life that i dreamed of having due to me needing to grow up fast to cater to adults that won’t listen to me. now at 21 years old, i started living my life like i was 16 years old, and it allowed me to discover myself and what i liked.

i started off identifying as a trans man, then gender fluid, then a trans man again, then trans masc (due to discourse about me dressing feminine), then non binary, then demigirl, and now possibly afab trans fem.

i am not intersex. i felt like my whole life, i wholeheartedly related to the experiences of trans women and fems not just internally but due to life circumstances that led me to not feel 100% at peace with my girlhood. i am still trans although. i do wish to transition. i want to remove my chest. i want to keep my hips. i’d like to start testosterone, while also presenting feminine. i like the idea of switching from masculine to feminine whenever i feel like it. i like the idea of having a low voice while being feminine. i like the idea of not fitting the societal norms of what a man or a woman should look like. i want to be myself, but it feels like my own people, my own community, is preventing me from doing so, which defeats the whole point of the LGBTQIA+ community.

sometimes, i just wish i could just be born a guy so i don’t have to worry about people hating on me just for being myself…

I am writing to you regarding a recent incident on your platform, Weverse.

There has been couple of users on Weverse that were making racist remarks towards your black users regarding a situation involving RIIZE’s Eunseok, including making AI Generated content involving black people. Some of these pictures involved exaggerated facial features and bodies to the degrading level, with others having black people picking cotton as a way to mock them. There were people making numerous posts talking about how black women/foreign girls are dirty, stupid pigs and always racist towards Chinese people. Some of their accounts are still up and active on your platform.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time this has happened to this nature, as there was another incident in 2021 where Engenes harassed black fans by spewing the N word, calling black people slaves, and posting graphic pictures where black people were being lynched on your platform. You are yet to make a statement regarding that situation.

Since this is the second time something like this has happened, I would like to request a change that will prevent something like this from happening again. These changes could include limiting or a complete termination of the Fan Posts, or better moderation practices that will prevent such an incident like this. There are some fans who felt unsafe using your platform to communicate to others regardless of what community they’re a part of due to some fans going into other fandom spaces to talk about their own favourite groups and going out of topic of the fandom space they’re in, which some people use this to their advantage to attack or spam unrelated posts about other groups.

Please make Weverse safe for all users regardless of race, ethnicity, or any other backgrounds.

Thank you.

(CW // Talks of adultification, sexual harassment, self harm, masturbation, body-image issues)

When I was 12 years old, I had a crush on a teacher at my new school that was a special needs school. I am neurodivergent, hence why I was taken there. My dumbass decided to tell someone about my crush even though I didn’t trust anyone and it spread towards the whole school which made me embarrassed.

A teacher sat me down one day and told me he cannot be with me due to my age (he was a grown adult in his 20s and I was 12), I understood and left the teacher after the chat. This was when I noticed that I still had a crush on him and I wasn’t sure why even though I understood nothing would come out of it. So with my research and the amount of times I called ChildLine when I wanted to vent about stuff, I learned about journaling to try and get these emotions out. So there would be a book I’d take to school and very important to note, I tend to have these emotions at school and it makes it harder for me to focus, so I would write few things in there before going back to my work. Waiting until I went home wasn’t an option for me, since it would go out of control and I’d risk telling another student who I knew I cannot trust due to their big mouths, so this is something I do daily.

Ever since I started bringing my journal book, the teachers started acting weird and threatening to kick me out over this whole situation. I remember a teacher telling me that she would have to either kick me or the teacher out but the teacher is very good at his job, so they’ll need to kick me instead. A very messed up thing to say to a growing 12 year old. I remember having an OC (original character) I made who had the same name as the teacher (which by the way he was made WAY before I came to the school) and a teacher was livid at the sight of the drawing despite me explaining that this wasn’t him. The OC had similar characteristics to the teacher such as having an afro, but he was designed to be one of my imaginary brothers since there were only girls in my family. Nonetheless, the teacher confiscated my book and told me not to bring it, even though there wasn’t anything wrong?

The breaking point was when everyone was sent outside. Me not being close to the other students, I just sat in the shade while writing in my journal. When I looked up, I saw a teacher walking towards me and she told me to go inside without any explaination. I was sent to an office when I was told that I was not allowed to be outside due to me using my book and now my parents have to pick me up so I can go home. To make the time go quicker, I threw a tantrum throwing things everywhere and crying because the whole time I was treated horribly by them and was treated like a criminal without them taking the time to understand me. Luckily, I was able to go home and I told my parents EVERYTHING.

Ever since then, I was traumatised from ever sharing my emotions, especially romantic ones. One incident in my tuition class after I left that school was me having a crush on a boy, and I was constantly telling myself not to have a crush on him or I will ruin my life and would be a horrible person. I would sometimes self harm if I had any sort of crush until any sort of romantic thoughts turned into bad flashbacks that would stop my crushes all together and it would leave me crying on my own.

I am 20 years old now and I’ve been looking back at all my moments. I am able to take accountability for some of the actions I done and realised how some of the things I done and the punishments I’ve been given were somewhat justified. However, there were some instances, especially this one, which lead to believe that there’s something else happening that makes me struggle to find what I did wrong. I remember being accused of masturbating in class (not the same school) when I was actually checking my underwear to see if I was on my period due to me unable to tell the teacher to go to the toilet. That is one hell of a stretch. I remember reading out loud during reading time (same school as the last story) and I was put into isolation due to me unable to read in my head and getting bored at every book given to me.

I read about adultification, and I am positive this has happened to me as a 12 year old black neurodivergent person. While yes this didn’t lead to serious cases where police were involved, but it can also include getting harsh punishments for small mistakes such as when I was forced into going to the disabled toilets instead of the girls toilets and not being allowed to hang out with the other girls my age (for a while, I wasn’t allowed to go out and play and I was forced in a room with a teacher), getting my innocence sexualised such as when I was accused of sexual harassment for trying to stop my confusing extreme crushes the best way I could without proper support, and also not getting enough proper support like the time where I was pulled out of class to talk about sex when I was 12 and was uncomfortable with it. Honourable mention, I was taken out of school to change due to me wearing my book day outside in school a week before and was told I wasn’t allowed to wear it. I understand it was against the rules, but the tone of the teacher’s voice wasn’t compassionate but rather harsh and degrading, almost like she was disgusted for wearing this outfit that I was really excited to wear.

These experiences lead me to have really bad self esteem, body-image issues, made me feel like I wasn’t allowed to be a kid, had lack of trust from those teachers, suffered from depression and anxiety growing up and overall I hated going to school that I felt like I had to pretend to be sick just so I didn’t need to go. As for the situation with the crush on the teacher, this impacted me so much as an adult that I struggled with my emotions and for a while I thought I turned asexual or have the inability to commit to a relationship due to my fear of accidentally sexually harassing someone without them telling me.

Every time I tell my story, people kept insisting that I indeed sexually harassed a teacher when I didn’t even do any of that. It took me finding videos of people talking about the adultification of black girls that I realised that I was just an innocent kid, the adults around me just didn’t allow me to do so. I thought maybe this is a Gen Z thing and I just had to get with the times and not follow everything I see from Gen X and Millennial media when really, I was looking at girlhood at the perspective of a privileged white neurotypical teenage girl who was able to be a teenager without fear of this happening to her. She was able to fall in love and pull out whenever possible. She was able to make mistakes and everyone calls her quirky. She was able to get in trouble, and she’ll be seen as “someone-who-made-a-silly-mistake-and-has-to-seek-her-teacher-after-school.”

K-pop isn’t the same anymore and I know EVERYONE can feel it, but what people don’t talk about is the fact that I don’t feel like home whenever I interact with K-pop stans.

I took a hiatus from posting on my tiktok because I felt like I was going to run the risk of getting harassed, death threats or even doxxed if my videos were to go to the wrong side of tiktok’s algorithm. All I ever did was post fun videos of me enjoying K-pop. Me going to a concert, talking about events I’ve been to, opening albums, talking about members I really like, etc. Just normal K-pop things, but it wouldn’t be normal to the people who find my posts to be weird.

All I wanted was a safe space to enjoy my interests, and to have at least one person in every post to comment under my posts but they don’t always happen. People expect me to look this aesthetically pleasing K-pop content creator when I am just a K-pop fan just like everyone else, who has celebrity crushes, likes to read fanfiction and enjoys fandom banter. I fear that those days are forever gone as more and more people choose to stand still at concerts for the “perfect video” rather than a shaky, imperfect video that showed how much fun they had. I’ve seen so many people get harassed for simply being normal K-pop fans with a crush, and they get seen as weird or obsessive which they’re now made to feel uncomfortable coming online all together after a random person makes a twitter thread about them just for not liking them. I’ve seen some of my favourite content creators go through the same thing, and it totally sucks.

I feel like I don’t fit in with the K-pop fandom nowadays. I feel like they’re either too stuck up that they like to call K-pop fans who know their faves’ anniversary and birthday dates (or whatever fandom activity that involves any sort of effort other than streaming) “parasocial”, or they’ll be weird, crazy, obsessed stans that harass people on Tiktok or Twitter for the sake of harassing people and I never felt like there’s a middle ground for anyone who feels like me where all they want is to be a normal fan who just wants to partake in fandom culture that isn’t just “dancing” (such as watching official content, learning about the members, fanfiction writing, fanarts and edits appreciation, celebrity crushes, etc) but still be sane enough to know that they can’t have them without anyone telling or reminding everyone since we’re in this big inside joke together. Does that sound like 2014? It sure is.

I just want that one K-pop friend to talk to that we are on the same wavelength as… that’s it. I hate feeling like I’m one post from ruining my life. I just want to be a normal K-pop fan in peace.