1. Introduction
[1.1] While the meaning of "fan cam" has now been extended to include any fan-made videos posted on social media—TikTok edits of Marvel characters, music video clips, and so on—the term stems from K-pop fandom, where it has a very specific definition (note 1). In this article, fan cam refers to a video produced by a moving camera that focuses on a specific performer during a performance of an idol group. The fan cam is distinguished from the stage camera in that the latter zooms in and out and shifts between different members of the group, while a fan cam follows one member throughout the entire performance and allows the viewer to focus on a single performer even when they are not captured on screen by the stage camera (video 1). The English term fan cam implies that the video is fan made, but many fan cams circulating on the internet are produced by TV networks hosting weekly music shows (note 2). In late 2017, fan cam became a North American stan Twitter favorite. Many K-pop fans randomly tacked fan cam videos under irrelevant Twitter posts with the aim of promoting their idols or deviating from what is considered a good tweet. These trolling fan behaviors were regarded as a nuisance to the general Twitter community and were used as an excuse for the stereotyping of K-pop fandom as shallowly youth oriented.
Video 1. Example of a fan cam: ISA of STAYC performing "Run2U" during KBS Song Festival 2022, uploaded on KBS's official channel, KBS Kpop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LESt3moJLmE, December 18, 2022).
[1.2] Despite K-pop's recent global popularity, studies of its fandom have mostly been restricted to region-specific case analyses. This article, on the other hand, aims at building a transnational link between K-pop fan cams' initial surge in popularity in South Korea following the success of idol-producing variety shows and their surprising use as an online political tool by the Twitter K-pop community during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. I argue that while on the surface, fan cams serve drastically different purposes in their North American and South Korean contexts, their functionality has always relied on the presumed passivity of the idol's performing body.
[1.3] K-pop studies have rapidly gained scholarly attention in the past few years, especially within fan studies. Yet the importance of fan cams as a growing subculture among the fan community and as a way of promoting K-pop overseas has not received enough recognition by acafans. Anglophone online discourses surrounding fan cams frequently take the term literally and misunderstand it as a purely fannish activity. By recounting the history of commercialization of fan cams and tracing their transnational platform migration from the South Korean Naver TV to YouTube and Twitter, I hope to articulate how this phenomenon can inform discussions on transcultural fandom as theorized by Bertha Chin and Lori Hitchcock Morimoto (2013). Despite sharing Twitter as a main site of fan activity, the North American and South Korean K-pop fandoms have minimal interactions and are divided by the English and Korean languages. Fan cams may be a surprising connection between the two sites, causing a similar affective reaction of self-fashioning projection for both South Korean and North American fans and translating the East Asian idol culture for an emerging North American fan community. Fan identification helps strengthen the bond between the idols and the fans, which further leads to K-pop's border-crossing popularity.
2. Fan cam activism during the BLM movement
[2.1] Videos of idols shot by fans or for fan sites during public appearances have long existed in the K-pop fan community, but they did not gain mainstream attention until late 2014, when a YouTube fan cam of HaNi from girl group EXID performing "Up and Down" went viral on Korean social media. The popularity of this video led to the song's reentry into music charts. "Up and Down" eventually climbed to number one in the charts more than three months after its original release (Elaine 2015). At the time of this article, the fan cam video has accumulated thirty-seven million views on YouTube. HaNi and her group EXID were pushed to overnight fame.
[2.2] HaNi's viral fan cam and her group EXID's ascent to fame prove that in the age of streaming, fan cams no longer exclusively serve the most loyal fan community but rather generate publicity and thus promote songs and artists more widely. In the late 2010s, as K-pop was achieving global recognition following Euro-American breakouts of groups like BTS and Blackpink, fan cams also crossed borders to become an anglophone K-pop fan favorite. The English Twitter community saw a rising trend of randomly embedding fan cam videos in (often irrelevant) Twitter posts' reply sections. The fans dropped the video with a one-liner, like "maybe if you had stanned" or "stan" to effectively shut off unfavorable remarks on their idols or simply derail a conversation regarding any topic. Apart from shutting down a tweet or conversation, the inclusion of videos in tweets also significantly increased Twitter engagement. Sage Anderson (2019) observes that depending on the tweet's popularity or controversiality, the traffic may "increase the view count attached to even the most banal comments," thus boosting the idols' profiles and giving the Twitter user a stronger presence on the platform. The downside of fans' tweet "hacking," however, is the general Twitter community's cynical impression of fans. Aja Romano (2020) notes that fan cam has become "a shorthand reference" for fandoms' "obsessive single-minded focus" on their idols. These trolling behaviors align with the stereotype of K-pop fans as overly devoted teenagers who specialize in bot-like, repetitive fan activities like nonstop streaming, online voting, and self-indulgently forcing everyone to acknowledge their favorite idols.
[2.3] However, in the summer of 2020, K-pop fans apparently put their trolling tactics to good use during the resurgence of the BLM movement spurred by the police killing of George Floyd. When the Dallas police launched the app iWatch Dallas for people to report law-breaking demonstrators, K-pop fans flooded the Dallas police official Twitter account with random K-pop videos—and many of these videos were fan cams. The app was disabled due to "technical issues" within a day, possibly because of such negative reactions on social media (Alexander 2020). Later, many K-pop fans spammed racist, white supremacist Twitter hashtags, such as #WhiteLivesMatter, with fan cams, eventually leading to these tags’ trending under the "K-pop" category on Twitter (Aswad 2020). Reactions to these vigilante behaviors were mixed: the fandom received approval for devoting its energy to righteous causes, but it also sparked a backlash against the community's own marginalization of black fans and K-pop's history of appropriating African American musical styles (Chatman 2020).
[2.4] These vigilante behaviors marked an important instance of K-pop fans proactively remastering their images. The fans are determined to prove that they as a group can also act for productive purposes like antiracism. Quoted in an Aljazeera article discussing the issue, researcher on Korean popular culture and University of Toronto professor Michelle Cho calls this collective behavior "a mobilisation of [progressive] young people" (quoted in Ekin 2020). They are dissatisfied both with systemic racism and with derogatory stereotypes of the K-pop community as lacking political or social consciousness. In hijacking racist hashtags to mark them as "K-pop," the fans are utilizing the social media platform to find a voice for themselves. Cho notes, however, that the online vigilantes' excitement was not shared by South Korean K-pop fans, who instead regarded BLM as an American phenomenon and worried about the possible political implications these posts made about their idols—whose fan cams were now all over the place. "Performers have to carefully balance how they acknowledge their domestic and American fans," Cho said, and these Twitter comments associated the idols with a political movement they may not have felt personally connected to (quoted in Ekin 2020).
3. Fan cam and idol producership
[3.1] Cho's comments suggest that K-pop stars' domestic and American fans held different expectations for them (quoted in Ekin 2020). The implication seemed to be that while American fans used their idols' images/videos for social justice purposes, South Korean fans preferred them to stay silent about sensitive political issues. To understand South Korean K-pop fans' reticence about the K-pop Twitter community's fan cam activism requires a return to the start of the fan cam era. The misleading English translation of fan cam has led to most English-language journalists explaining the term as videos "produced by fansites and proliferated by social media" (Anderson 2019). What is frequently ignored is the history of the commercialization of fan cams in the past decade. Initially, fan cams were only published on fan websites for the most loyal fans to enjoy a more focused view of their idols' performances. Before their arrival on the North American Twitter landscape, fan cams were published by South Korean music show networks, which had sensed the opportunity to gain more views by publishing their own fan cams. As a result, most of the so-called fan cams circulating on Twitter are commercially produced.
[3.2] MNET, the subscriptions television host of weekly music show M Countdown, was one of the first to detect the commercial potential of fan cams. In mid-2014, MNET began uploading fan cams of performers shot during rehearsals to its YouTube channel. Although retaining the name fan cam, these and similar videos are properly lit, professionally shot, and officially released by television networks. If a fan cam garners a decent number of views, it generates advertising revenue for the network paid by YouTube. MNET was proven to have made the right decision, as only a few months later HaNi's legendary "Up and Down" fan cam, mentioned previously, exploded on YouTube, bringing attention to fan cams from outside the fandom and showing that fan cams can have an audience among the general YouTube community.
[3.3] It was 2016 when the fan cam culture took off because of Produce 101 (2016–19), a reality show that first aired on MNET. Produce 101 was an idol-producing project that allowed the audience to vote for their favorite eleven girls out of 101 trainees to form a girl group. With the slogan "pick me," the show referred to the voters as "national producers," actively engaging them in the formation of an idol group. During the length of the show, the girls participated in several rounds of competition, where they were divided into temporary groups to prepare for stage competitions. After each round of performance, individual fan cams of the trainees were released online. These fan cams let the viewers of the show check details of the performance and thus decide whether the contestant was qualified to debut. The number of views a trainee got was also an important indicator of their popularity, so fans would relentlessly stream the fan cams to prove that their favorite contestant was able to attract an audience for their performances. Fan cams were uploaded both on YouTube and Naver TV, the South Korean domestic video sharing and streaming platform. But as Produce 101 was claimed as a show for national producers, voters tended to focus primarily on Naver TV for streaming (figure 1). When the trainees debuted officially, however, they went on music shows to promote their songs and then fans switched to prioritizing streaming fan cams on YouTube, a larger platform with a worldwide audience.
Figure 1. Produce 101 fan cam on Naver TV of contestant Choi Yoo-Jung performing "Bang Bang" for Second Round Position Evaluation (dance). Screenshot by the author.
[3.4] Produce 101 was a smash hit in Korea, and MNET subsequently aired three more seasons, alternately producing girl groups and boy groups. The success of Produce 101 quickly spread the fan cam craze to the wider K-pop fan community, beyond Produce 101 voters. The series was also reproduced in China (2018–21) and Japan (2019–), and a Thai version is forthcoming. The increased demand for commercially produced fan cams encouraged other TV stations to regularly upload fan cams of artists performing in their shows, including KBS Music Bank, MBC Music Core, and SBS Inkigayo—the three largest Korean weekly music shows. The idea that the number of an idol's fan cam views reflects their popularity and stage charisma was absorbed by the wider K-pop fandom. Whenever individual fan cams of an idol group are released, fans go straight to their favorite member and stream their fan cam for higher views. Fan cams themselves have also evolved into various different forms. Apart from the initial form of vertical full-body fan cams, there are now also horizontal fan cams, alternatively called face cams/close-up cams, which focus on the upper body of the idol so that their facial expressions are seen more clearly; group fan cams, focused on the whole group with a camera placed in front of the stage; and high-angle/sky/tower cams, which are group fan cams shot from above the stage (figure 2). Nothing on the stage goes undetected by these omnipresent recordings.
Figure 2. Different fan cams of ITZY's December 4, 2022 "Cheshire" performance on Inkigayo: from top to bottom, member Yuna's face cam; group sky cam; and group full cam. Screenshot by the author.
4. Identity creation through fan cam viewing
[4.1] Even with these contexts, the link between fan cams and social activism may still seem elusive. I believe that the uncanny connection between these two elements is the fan's—the fan cam viewer's—ability to construct the self through viewing fan cams, premised on the passivity of their idols' performing bodies. Having established its status as a fandom routine from idol-producing programs, fan cam viewing channels the act of promoting an idol into one of configuring one's own fannish identity.
[4.2] In his study of the transnational popularity of Hallyu—or the Korean wave—Kyung Hyun Kim (2021) argues that within the past several decades, K-pop has possibly been the only music movement whose global success has relied more on the online fandom than on the actual music. Korean idol culture centers on "parading" its performers (35–36). K-pop fan culture, taking its roots from the earlier Japanese idol industry, encourages fans' over-identification with their idols, leading to loyal fan behaviors, including bulk-buying albums and nonstop streaming of music and videos. The extra devotion of fans is an important reason why K-pop thrives in the age of social media.
[4.3] Another aspect unique to East Asian idol culture is the idols' training. Before K-pop really took off in the late 2010s, Dal Yong Jin (2016), in his study of its earlier transnational spread through social media, observed that the novelty of the K-pop industry to non-Koreans is the training system, in which "K-pop idol hopefuls endure [years] to ensure their debuts are successful" (117). To become a K-pop idol usually includes the process of auditioning to become a trainee; years of training in dance, singing, and even variety show skills; and passing a final evaluation to be found qualified for debut. Kim (2021) argues that K-pop idols, having gone through many stages of training since a very young age, are "systematically programmed into docility" and dependence on the corporate culture that supports their training and debut (51). Idols have thus long been framed more as manufactured products than artists. Their behaviors must tacitly follow the expectations of their fans and their agencies. The success of a reality show like Produce 101, in which who gets the chance to debut as an idol depends solely on the viewers, made explicit and further justified the commercialization of idols, who are sent by their agencies for the chance to debut and voluntarily submit to the fan cam gaze in order to be picked by the viewers (note 3).
[4.4] In an analysis of the first season of Produce 101, Grace Kweon (2018) aptly summarizes that the voters "are meant to feel that they raised the trainees from infancy to maturity, that they can claim ownership and responsibility for the new group's success." Furthermore, as the group is selected by what are presumed to be national viewers, even those who did not participate in voting also feel entitled to "scrutinize and support the new group's activities" (52).
[4.5] Fan cams serve as a powerful tool for this scrutinizing gaze on the idols. They expose the performing idol even when they are not captured on screen and put the idol under constant surveillance during a performance. The camera affords the viewer extreme intimacy by tailing the performer throughout a performance, leading to a closer identification between the viewer and the performer. For some very devoted fans who have been contributing to the success of their idols, watching fan cams becomes a way to inspect their pick. The normalization of fan cams as official releases by TV networks further acknowledges this surveilling gaze.
[4.6] Indeed, in the past few years, fan cam culture has facilitated surveillance behaviors, especially in the East Asian context. In K-pop online forums, there are frequent posts using screenshots from fan cams as evidence for criticizing idols for being half-hearted when they do not occupy the center of the stage or for gaining visible weight, especially when the idols are female. Those who do not live up to fan standards for weight control are disqualified by the online public. Many fan cams have gone viral because fans were eager to witness the idols' laziness or weight gain and to participate in online trolling or because they wanted to see the idols in revealing costumes from a closer angle (Scott 2022). Fan cams visualize what Kim (2021) describes as the K-pop industry's parading of idol performers.
[4.7] Kweon (2018) argues that viewers of Produce 101, called "national producers," also "configure their own citizenship" when they vote for an ideal idol group, enacting a spirit of cultural nationalism (54). While nationalistic feelings may not be shared by K-pop fans who did not vote for Produce 101, there is likely a comparable sense of configuring one's own identity when watching the fan cams, by directing one's scrutinizing gaze to the performing idols' bodies. By monitoring idols' behaviors, fans feel that they have some say in determining what an idol should and should not do. When fans stream fan cams, they are checking on the person that they have emotionally and financially invested in. This intimate viewing strengthens fans' attachment to their idols. The fans may feel a responsibility for producing the best version of their idols and hence a best version of themselves. For Euro-American fans who recently became aware of K-pop and were not necessarily well versed in East Asian idol culture, fan cam viewing translated the idol system, which is dependent on fans' monitoring of and strong identification with their idols.
5. Connecting the two threads
[5.1] When discussing BTS's transnational success in North America and Europe, Kim (2021) argues that social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube have played an important part in propagating Korean idol culture globally. In this culture, strong identification between fans and idols was encouraged to such an extent that sometimes "there can be no distinction between a fan identity and their own personal identity" and "when their idols succeed, fans feel exalted, and when their idols fail, they feel as if themselves have been kicked in the guts" (59). I argue that fan cams and their ability to create identifications between idols and fans are crucial for translating this fan–idol identification overseas. Fan cams have played a role in familiarizing Euro-American fans with East Asian idol culture.
[5.2] Turning again to the K-pop vigilantes who used fan cam clips on Twitter in the summer of 2020, it may not seem so inconceivable that fan cams, which emerged from commercially cultivated collective producership, would become a weapon for K-pop fans to shut down stereotypes and reclaim their image as socially conscientious youths. K-pop fans active in the English-language Twitter community may not have been terribly familiar with HaNi, Produce 101, or the group IOI formed from the show, which disbanded in early 2017, but the function of fan cams as the bearers for fans' overidentifying gazes is preserved when clips are repurposed for protest. The North American fans who used fan cams as tools for social justice and the South Korean fans who employed fan cams as tools for idol producership share an affective connection with their idols through which they configure their own fan identities—ultimately their own identity.
[5.3] This also helps explain the contradiction between K-pop fans' acts as online racism fighters and K-pop idols' relative passivity toward political and social issues. During the 2020 BLM movement, many K-pop idols with a significant number of North American fans had to balance their acknowledgement of domestic and American fans, as noted by Cho (quoted in Ekin 2020). While many North American fans, who were now responsible for much of their presence on stan Twitter, might have expected their idols to state their support for the movement, speaking about politics could lead to controversies for the idols. Therefore, most idols chose to stay silent so that they wouldn't annoy fans who didn't want them to get involved in North American political discourses. Their ability to stay passive toward public events was also assisted by the idol system itself: most idols are not allowed to have individual social media accounts until they become very experienced, and frequently, the questions idols answer during press conferences or interviews are filtered beforehand by their agencies.
[5.4] Despite the reluctance idols may feel about commenting on political issues, through fans' use of their fan cams, they can still serve as the face of online campaigns, since this is what their North American fans feel they should stand for. The use of their videos to spam racist hashtags is not different than how these videos are tacked under random tweets by fans wishing to promote the idols. South Korean national producers produce themselves in the process of deciding how an idol should behave. Similarly, stan Twitter also found its own voice by using fan cam videos all over the platform. Ironically, the fans' self-invention is an instance of politicizing a fan practice that is, in turn, based on the K-pop idol's depolicitized body. The new era of fan cam use, initiated by idol-producing shows, made fan cams a visualization of Korean idol culture and served to export fan–idol identification beyond East Asia.
[5.5] The migration of K-pop fan cams from the South Korean online community to the North American one, while the fan cams are apparently utilized for drastically different purposes, preserves the passivity of the idols' bodies and hence the fan cam viewers' ability to carve out or reinvent their identities. Thus, while it may be easy to attribute South Korean fans' dislike of K-pop artists' being called out for not openly supporting BLM protests to East Asian society's perceived lack of interest in racial issues, there is nonetheless an affective affinity between fan cam viewers in both contexts. In "Towards the Theory of a Transcultural Fandom," Bertha Chin and Lori Hitchcock Morimoto (2013) call for a retheorization of transcultural fandom that does not overemphasize "nation-based differences or similarities" in border-crossing texts' appeal to fans in different geographical locations: "a subjective moment of affinity regardless of origin" may also help a text travel across borders (99). The close identification that K-pop fan cams allow between a viewer and an idol creates such a "subjective moment of affinity" for the national producers in South Korea and the Twitter K-pop activists in North America.
6. Acknowledgement
[6.1] An early version of this article was presented at the 2022 Society For Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Conference. I would like to thank Dr. Mel Stanfill for encouraging me to submit it here and the editorial team's comments and help.