About This Blog

 

About This Blog

Welcome to Line Has Thoughts — a place for K-pop, fandom, music, media, and all the thoughts I apparently cannot keep to myself.

I’m Line, a 40-something K-pop fan, writer, and lifelong overthinker. I started this blog because I wanted somewhere to write about the things that interest me without reducing everything to hot takes, fanwars, or 280 characters.

K-pop is at the centre of a lot of what I write, but the thoughts tend to wander. You’ll find music and lyric analysis, fandom discussions, media literacy, reflections on being an older fan, reactions to conversations happening in K-pop spaces, and the occasional deep dive that started with a very simple question and got completely out of hand.

And sometimes, I’ll wander outside K-pop altogether. Line Has Thoughts is deliberately broad enough for that. If a story, case, piece of media, cultural question, or completely unrelated rabbit hole catches my attention and gives me thoughts, there’s a good chance I’ll write about that too. Consider K-pop the main neighbourhood rather than the city limits.

I’m particularly interested in the grey areas: the places where “everyone knows” something that perhaps we don’t actually know, where narratives become accepted as fact, or where a subject is more complicated than the loudest takes make it seem.

This isn’t a news site, and I don’t pretend to be an authority on everything I write about. It’s a personal blog: one person thinking things through, asking questions, doing some research, changing my mind when the evidence warrants it, and occasionally having very strong opinions.

You don’t have to agree with me. In fact, thoughtful disagreement is considerably more interesting than an echo chamber.

Thanks for being here.

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The First K-pop Song That Made Me Cry

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  The Song That Surprised Me I was sitting at my computer one afternoon in the early spring of 2021, listening to BTS while scrolling through lyric translations on Doolset’s blog. Outside, the world was still quiet — not quite in lockdown anymore, but not back to normal either. My job had been shut down for months due to COVID-19, and even though I knew I’d be returning soon, I wasn’t looking forward to it. The burnout had settled deep. Then the song changed. “00:00 (Zero O’Clock)” started playing. I was half-reading, half-listening — not expecting anything more than the usual comfort their music gave me. But as I read through the lyrics, something cracked open. I burst into tears. It was the first time a BTS song made me cry — and the first time I realized how much their music had become a source of emotional comfort. It wasn’t even a dramatic moment. Just this soft, quiet unraveling. A line about waiting for the clock to reset, about the promise that tomorrow might feel dif...
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“Too Old” for Fandom? What I’ve Learned Being a Fan in My 40s

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Are KATSEYE K-pop? What Happens When the System Goes Global

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KATSEYE. Image: HYBE x Geffen Records / KATSEYE official website If you'd asked me a while ago whether KATSEYE were K-pop, I probably wouldn't have thought very hard about the question. HYBE is involved. They went through an intensive training programme based on the K-pop trainee system. They dance. They have the choreography, the performance focus, the fandom culture. They're on Weverse. They've promoted on Korean music shows. They certainly look like they belong in the same general universe as K-pop. So... K-pop. Obviously. Except I'm no longer convinced it's that simple. This whole rabbit hole started because I kept seeing KATSEYE referred to as a K-pop group, and something about it bothered me. Not because the members aren't Korean — K-pop has had non-Korean idols for years. Not because they mostly sing in English — established K-pop groups release music in English, Japanese and other languages all the time. It bothered me because KATSEYE weren't ac...
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