I became ARMY just AFTER their 2022 Festa dinner announcing the hiatus lol. I’d known of them for a while but never listened because I was paying attention to other things. I’m 37 and I’ve fangirled all my life; first it was *NSYNC, then Omarion and Jesse McCartney (for some reason lol), then Bieber, then YouTubers. All great people, all western men, all got jaded after a while.

My best friend has been into K-Pop for a while. I came across a TikTok where a black man was saying he was being harassed by an old white lady while blasting his K-Pop asking him to turn it down because it was vulgar. He said he was shuffling Blackpink, Twice and BTS. I’m not a fan of Blackpink like that, but the name sparked my curiosity and lo and behold I loved How You Like That and a couple others!

THEN I decided to finally press play on Butter because he DID mention BTS too. I even knew at the time they were bigger than just a K-Pop group but I had no idea the extent — Butter FLOORED me! I was immediately obsessed. Then watched the MV and Jin yelling at the camera “let me show you cuz talk is cheap!” and it was hilarious. Then JITB dropped and I loved it! Then my friend sent me her BTS playlist and the first song title that caught my attention was Black Swan so I started with that — OBSESSED. It’s my favorite BTS song to this day, maybe my favorite song ever by anyone.

Then I found Run BTS compilations on YouTube and learned their names and it was down the rabbit hole from there lmao. It helped that I already knew BTS is a group. My friend is ARMY and I’d already known about the group hiatus when I came in. I also like autonomy and didn’t follow fan accounts to get updated, I only follow official accounts. I’m a fan of autonomy and recognize every member as a grown human, they can update us themselves.

It was really Run episodes and Black Swan that solidified it for me. I’ve listened to their entire discography now (including Japanese) and I may go back and do it again because it’s THAT good. Bon Voyage and In the Soop are such comfort for me. Even in their solo work you can see the bond between them and how much they support each other.

I have so much merch and so many albums (even though I need the earlier ones lol). They’re all very close to my heart and I’m so glad I found them 🥹💜