I am coming up on my fourth year of being a kpop fan. The culture is so immersive that I can’t help but be interested in it. Some people have even made kpop a good part of their personality, being the one to even name a groups fanbase. 

Others go into a territory that is so unbelievably disrespectful, they’d be better off just fanning over American artists. Asian fetishization has been a prevalent issue since the dawn of media. Literary tropes and stereotypes have set the culture back decades and it’s depressing, which leads me to the topic of this article- Tophia slydell of tik tok. 

Stan culture, while being a whole other experience, it is an experience you’ve got to be careful with. The place where you should be the most careful is social media. Tophia is a tik tokker currently residing in a New Mexico hotel with her elderly, sick mother Marie Lucero. She considers herself a kpop Stan, but her knowledge is severely lacking, leading followers to believe she uses her standom as a cover up for an Asian fetish. 

It isn’t common for a kpop fan to have an empty wallet after going to a bands concert, what isn’t common is for that wallet to stay empty for months on end after. Tophia lacks responsibility so after going to a bts concert, her family was left houseless and needed to live in a U-Haul truck-later on going from hotel to hotel.

It’s also ok to see your ideal type in a kpop idol, but Tophia’s ideal type seems to be Asian men- underage Asian men. She was caught in a past live video with screen time from an adult site of twenty seven minutes, the search history being mostly Asian. She is also a fan of only male groups, one of her biases being an underage member of enhyphen.