I think it’s important to remember, no you don’t need to know everything about Korean culture in order to stan a Korean group but you should keep in mind they do have a different culture and you shouldn’t put your own cultures expectations and values on them. That’s ethnocentric.

Don’t be ethnocentric

As someone who lives as an expat and got a degree in intercultural studies, I can tell you that, while we have all these great translations and subtitles, not everything is always clear in terms of intention or meaning because we don’t readily have a cultural lens and sometimes

people can cling to a word or a sentence or something said by another person which could be interpreted as one thing in one culture but that’s not the meaning of it in another. Culture is much like an ice berg, we can really only see the tip of it, and most meaningful things are

beneath the water, heck half the time without proper examination, we don’t even understand the motivations in our own culture. This is just something I have been thinking about a lot lately, because interacting in my new host culture as an expat always has to be layered with

grace and understanding, and K-idols function globally entering into multiple host cultures without that, so I think as best we can, as fans, we should try to be a layer of grace and understanding and not cling to words which fit our own agendas but try to understand them.

I’ll just use this for example: in my new host culture if I’m greeted with “you’ve gotten fat” the literal meaning is I have gotten fat. In my home culture, this is not a good thing. It’s actually a horrible thing to say to someone but, from my Auntie in my new host culture who

tells me this, it’s a compliment. She is happy to see I’m eating and I’m healthy.
The same thing when they tell me my nose is big. In my home culture this is an insult, but in my new host culture, it’s a compliment. They think big noses are strong looking. Cultural differences.

Just gonna put this here again and mute this thread cuz it’s starting to get too much attention and I always get anxious bye