Not to be so deeply late to this but have u guys also been listening to The Thing With Feathers because I just started listening to them last week and their shit HITS‼️
there's a good example for this whole age "discourse" thing. say it wasn't kpop but rather some disney star, let's go with miley cyrus when she was doing hannah montana, she was 13-18 when she was doing that show, a show that was crearly meant for an audience of a similar age, so if any adult was investing any big amount of time of that it did raise some eyebrows because why are you watching a show that is meant for kids when there's content made for you (there's a lot of nuance within that as well but still). sure you could've enjoyed the songs, maybe watch the show with a kid from your family but you never invested any more time on it besides that because you were not the target audience. the difference with kpop is that they're putting kids of the same age range miley was when doing that show, but the target audience is not the same, it's adults, it's whoever wants to consume kpop, so at surface it seems like there is not any issues with it because, hey, if i'm the target audience why can't i enjoy this? why can't i spend my day enjoying this content made by teenagers even if i'm an adult? if you take all the context out it's odd no matter how you put it. "but context matters!!!!" sure, it does, but shouldn't the safety of the teenagers matter more? shouldn't we be more worried about why these companies keep debuting younger and younger kids instead of if we're being accused of being a weirdo? like ask yourself why is it weird to possibly like a disney show but not weird to like a kpop group with teens the same age as the disney star as an adult
I'm visiting my family for my cousins quince/18th (do the math on when her actual quinceañera would have been to know why it was delayed) and I'm not one for theater, to many people and I'm blind, but my mom's gift to her was 2 tickets to hadestown, a play my mother already saw, and which my cousin couldn't get any of her friends to go to with her to. Which is to say I took her. and by fucking god I know he's a capitalist but they did so good with Hades.
Coworker: “Wow! You’re so brave for running the mic like that!”
[laughs nervously] They don’t know I was raised in a cult and allowed to give comments I couldn’t possibly understand at age four. They don’t know I gave my first ministry school talk at age seven. They don’t know I was forced to knock on doors and talk to strangers. They don’t know I had to do phone witnessing to uphold my appearance of godliness so I would be deemed “responsible enough” to start driving and even have this job in the first place. I am completely desensitized to mic-fright.