Idols, Fandoms, and Where the Moral Compass Lives

With great power comes great responsibility. I keep coming back to this quote, time and again, in my life.

I reflected on it when Taylor Swift was not speaking out the way I thought she should. I came back to it when a section of the fandom boycotted BTS ARMY: Forever We Are Young because BTS did not speak up for Palestine. I have often thought about it with reference to myself. I am not a celebrity. Yet, I have a platform, and I am careful about what I put on it, especially when I am speaking to larger issues. On Facebook in 2017 I posted, “… there is no greater vice than apathy.”

Having said that, I also have to think about what it means to be part of a fandom. What it means to put people on pedestals where they may or may not belong. The idols do not ask to be put there. We put them there.

Just this past week, two controversies came one after the other. One: BTS partnered with Google to advertise Gemini, their AI product. Two: not all of BTS, but Namjoon, my bias, and J-Hope went to a Chris Brown concert. Then they posted online, tagging Chris Brown in a photo of the two of them with him, along with clips of themselves enjoying the concert.

One of these did not bother me at all, and the other did not register until I saw the uproar online.

The Gemini ad? I reposted it on my socials. As a heavy AI user, my views on AI have changed. I started the year staunchly anti-AI. Past the middle of the year, I am a power user. Is AI the solution for everything? No. Do you need AI to generate deepfakes, or animate existing pictures, or bring back dead people’s voices? Not in my opinion. In over five months, I have watched the tool bring back decades of correspondence stored across different mediums, trace patterns of thought, link connected threads and revive my joy for writing. At work, it has condensed weeks’ worth of effort to hours. So, I have drawn my line on acceptable use of AI.

Now, the Chris Brown concert. Should they go to concerts? Absolutely yes! Should they enjoy music they consider formative, or the music of their peers? Absolutely they should. If these are people looking for snatches of normal in their lives, it is perfectly fine for them to go enjoy Chris Brown’s music if that is what they want to do. But they made it part of the public discourse. They chose to post it online and tag him. Even if they had not known, or had chosen to overlook what their actions would mean, the outcry is coming from people feeling let down. What fans choose to do with that is on them. They built this fandom from the ground up by showing themselves vulnerable, by being people who took feedback, reflected, and changed, and they did all of it in public, as ambassadors of peace. Chris Brown assaulted his then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009 and pleaded guilty to felony assault. Coming from idols at the center of this thriving, vibrant community, their actions are giving me and a large swath of the fandom pause.

We may never be privy to all the factors at work, and we should not have to be. But it is perfectly fine for a fan to express their disappointment and not feel dismissed. That is part of the parasocial contract we enter into when we choose to join a fandom, or when an idol chooses to become an idol. When I wrote A Star Keeps Its Distance I spent a lot of time thinking about fandom. BTS and ARMY informed a lot of what I wrote into the book.

We will all have different standards to which we hold our idols up, and that is totally on us. We can choose to be disappointed and continue to support them. We can choose to walk away. We can choose to lower our engagement. That is on us. It speaks to where our moral compass lives. Over the years, the people I have idolized have eventually been lowered from pedestals. Obama gave me hope. Reflecting on his administration now, there are things I feel disappointed in. Harris and Walz did the same. Their views on support to Israel and Palestine did not line up with mine, but I voted for them with gusto because I believed in the larger cause. I watched the BTS documentary because I was invested in this fandom. One I saw myself a part of. I will continue to support BTS over the rest of their career unless they do something that crosses the line for me.

We draw these lines. The line is not the same for everyone. We constantly negotiate whether the people we idolize still belong based on how flexible we are willing to keep them. The negotiation is also part of growing up as people and as fans. As new information comes to light, it is okay to question, reevaluate and change course. That applies to all of us: idols and fans.

As for me, I am reading Namjoon’s interview on how he curated art for SFMOMA this fall and wondering if a trip to California might be a little too much to hope for.

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