When a huge cultural phenomenon takes place, two things happen: fans come out proclaiming their love while others call out other fans and call them bandwagoners.
It doesn’t matter what it is. Whether it’s a sporting event, a pageant, or a book/comic turned movie/series, there will always be someone hating on bandwagoners.
First off, what is a bandwagoner? Culturally speaking, it’s a person who joins a fandom recently, as opposed to fans who have been fans from the start or when “it wasn’t mainstream.” In short, they’re the hardcore stans. I’m sure you know a few.
I don’t know why people hate on new fans but the question I want to ask is: what’s wrong with being one?
A good example would be the K-pop community. More and more people are getting into the music genre and there are fans who’ve been around longer who feel that the new fans are just hopping on the bandwagon because it’s popular. This was put on the spotlight when a TV host said after a K-pop concert, “The kids went gaga over Wanna One tonight, and imagine P13,000 tickets and kids get their parents to spend for songs the lyrics of which hindi naman naiintindihan ng Pinoy.” The host added, “It’s the look, I think!”
While the host didn’t say directly that they were bandwagoners, the person implied that there were fans who were just in it for the look, never mind the music. Fans reacted all over social media, saying that many of them check the English translation of Korean songs online or even study the language.
The host’s accusation came around the same time as the release of a research paper titled Non-Korean consumers’ preferences on Korean popular music: A two-country study done by Jungyop Ryu (Yonhap News Agency), Erik Paolo Capistrano (University of the Philippines Diliman), and Hao-Chieh Lin (National Sun Yat-sen University). The study compared Taiwanese and Filipino fans, and it found that Taiwanese fans were more focused on quality while Filipino fans were more focused on what’s popular.
While the study had interesting insights, I don’t see anything wrong with being a new fan to a fandom that’s popular at the time (I’m also sure that the researchers meant no shade in their findings). Being that kind of fan who likes what’s popular doesn’t make me less of one compared to someone who’s been there for years.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to K-pop only. You can replace K-Pop with anything: the NBA, Game of Thrones, Marvel comics, even random things like milk tea brands.
The thing is, there are people who think they’re special snowflakes for knowing about something before it became mainstream, then get pissed off because it’s now all over social media. Do you remember those posts of your friends lamenting how everyone will now have H&M and Uniqlo when the two fast fashion brands opened here? I even have one friend who posted the label from an H&M shirt he had even before the first store opened here. WHY.
What people don’t seem to realize is that a thing will last longer because it’s being patronized by fans. A network will cancel a TV show if not enough people watch it. An obscure restaurant will close its doors if they don’t get customers.
Most importantly, before you became the #1 fan of whatever it is you’re stanning, you were a bandwagoner, too.
