Why Tom Merritt went viral with KPop Fans
Hey folks,
If you listen to Great Night with Brian and Justin you may have heard a version of this story. I had a few tweets blow up in a few corners of K-Pop and K-drama fandom.
While I may not talk about it all the time I'm a fan. I've watched tons of K-dramas with Eileen. Some of my favorites are Hotel Del Luna, It's OK To Not Be OK, W, Mr. Queen and Crash Landing on You. My Love from the Star was the one that really got me interested. And of course I like Goblin. Everybody loves Goblin and for good reason.
But I've almost lost some of you so let me bring it back to the main story.
We've been very excited to watch a new Korean drama called Snowdrop. It just got released outside of Korea on February 8th. It's set in the 1980s, so it's got that going for it. Super fun period piece. And it stars Jisoo from Blackpink as the female lead.
Short digression. Blackpink was the first Kpop band I got into. They're amazing. My bias is Lisa, one of the rappers. I like a lot of Korean artists. I also love IU, who I got to know first from Hotel Del Luna. And my wife got me into BTS. AKMU and Heize are a couple others I have on my playlists.
Anyway before I lose some of you AGAIN, we were excited to see Jisoo act. She's very good! And the plot of Snowdrop weaves romantic stories with the democracy movement of late 1980s Korea and a spy story involving North Korea. Intrigue galore!
So. I tweeted this on February 12th.
Snowdrop on Disney+ is very good.
Someone who followed me saw it and retweeted it. Somebody in the fandom saw that and retweeted it and it took off like wildfire. As of this writing, it has 2,706 retweets and 12,000 likes. That is quite a lot for me.
So then, I'm watching the Super Bowl on Sunday. There was a running play and I think, if I remember right, a fumble. And Cris Collinsworth says something along the lines of "everything they need is right there, on the ground." This, if you don't know is quite similar to a line from Rosé of Blackpink's solo song "On the ground."
Which got me thinking. These guys have said "How you like that?" More than once. That's the title of a Blackpink song. They've said "playing with fire," which is also a Blackpink song. And I swear I heard Collinsworth say something along the lines of one of the players being the "loudest in the room" which is a line from Lisa of Blackpink's solo song LaLisa.
So with the thought in mind that some Blackpink fans of Snowdrop might be paying attention, I tweeted the following
“Everything they need is on the ground”
The Super Bowl is full of references to BlackPink.
And that one got 1,859 retweets and 6, 8881 likes.
And may have helped spur on a campaign to get Blackpink into the Super Bowl halftime show.
I made a few more tweets about watching Snowdrop and got a lot of folks paying attention. And then we went to a TWICE concert at the Forum in Inglewood on Tuesday. TWICE is another popular K-pop band that sings in Korean and Japanese. I became familiar with them when Bryce Castillo played one of their songs in the pre-show for an episode of Cordkillers and then Eileen got into them with the song Fancy.
I Tweeted about going to see TWICE and made a few more Snowdrop tweets, thinking there might be some people interested. But, I have to say, the last few tweets about it have got minimal attention. Maybe the novelty of seeing an old man podcaster who legitimately likes these things wore off. Maybe they got suspicious about why I was tweeting. Or maybe they just did what the internet does and moved on.
In any case it was super fun. I enjoyed interacting with fellow BLINKs (Blackpink fans) on Twitter and had some fun exchanges with them. I hope they know it's all genuine. I am an official BLINK. I got the membership in December before any of this.
Eileen and I will finish Snowdrop this weekend I expect. And I will tweet a few more times about it just to complete the record.
And maybe I'll do more K-Pop and K-drama tweets in the future just for the heck of it. I'm probably some kind of ARMY as well (BTS fan) as I've seen almost all the episodes of Run BTS, have a few Shooky items and consider Agust D to be one of my favorite rap artists. Suga is my bias after all.
If anything, I hope maybe this helps me and others understand that what you like is what you like and you don't have to fit into a box to like it. I can read Scientific American cover to cover, talk international relations with smart folks like Jen Briney, host the world's definitive tech podcast and still get excited when Lisa drops a single, or tickets to watch Muster go on sale.
Have I told you about Twenty Five Twenty One? See it's a fencer in high school during the IMF crisis in the 90s....
Tom
Tom Merritt on Twitter: "Snowdrop on Disney+ is very good." — twitter.com “Snowdrop on Disney+ is very good.”
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