so i've officially had an account on this site for 10 years as of january 3rd, 2022.  it feels kinda weird, it doesn't feel like it's been that long, can you believe 2012 was ten years ago? so many of the groups and people that got me into kpop and made me join this site back then aren't even active or together anymore. big bang, block b, 2ne1, snsd, girl's day, t-ara, b.a.p, f(x), miss a  and after school are all either disbanded or on some type of indefinite hiatus (with the exception of shinee and nu'est)  which likely means they have disbanded and haven't officially confirmed it yet or they will pretty soon. honestly, i forget about this site a lot and often go weeks or even months without visiting and logging in. i used to be so obsessed with and in love with kpop, i'd spend hours on here reading fanfics and chatting in the now defunct chat (r.i.p aff chatango and shoutout to those who remember the chat).  i'd also met quite a few people on here that i talked to regularly and considered to be online friends, though unfortunately they all disappeared over the years and/or stopped using this site all together so we lost contact. as i've gotten older and the years have gone by, the site has clearly changed a lot from when i initially joined and started using it regularly. obviously one of the biggest changes is what kpop groups are now popular/relevant as the ones who are the most popular now didn't even exist 10 years did years ago or were just trainees. as the 2nd/golden generation slowly started to end and the 3rd generation came around, i found myself feeling more distanced from kpop and kpop fans as the music started to change, the idols started to change, and the fans started to change. a lot of groups were starting to look and sound like carbon copies of each other and the members all seemed to give off these really fake and weird vibes to me.  not to mention that talent seemed to start being less important and looks became more important. you had people in second gen groups who spend a lot of their childhood and several years training to debut then sudddenly people just got to be on a survival show for a few weeks and be put in a group and handed stardom. 

  i eventually started spending less and less time on here, and opened the site less and less as i wasn't interested in newer groups and the groups i liked reading about stopped getting as much material published.  there was also the fact that people seemed to be more closed off and there was not as much friendliness as there used to be, people really started to seem very unapproachable and it seemed making friends on here wasn't something that was really done anymore. i did eventually get into some 3rd generation groups  like madtown, hotshot, topp dogg, b.i.g, imfact, and girlkind but unfortunately a lot of them ended up disbanding or becoming inactive as well due to so many groups debuting and the industry becoming oversaturated.  if they didn't disband then they just weren't as popular or successful as other groups thus they didn't have as many fans which meant no one to really interact or talk about them with and very few if any fanfics at all. i'm also really turned off by how so many people force you to subscribe just to read their story, i feel like you should really let people decided if they want to subscribe based on whether they find it good or not and not have it be 'give me a subscription or you can't read it'. i know you can just unsubscribe if you don't find it to be good, but why even make people have to do that to begin with? it just seems really cheap and desperate to me, that's just my opinion though.  i still do get on here a bit to see if there's any good story for me to read or to re-read old stories from years ago. i've considered starting to write fanfiction again but seeing as how i really only follow a select few groups occasionally and am mainly a second gen kpop fan, they'd likely be anime related or possibly about  jpop/jrock idols. though, even with this site being called asian fanfics, it's definitely always been more geared towards kpop and other countries/genres get ignored or treated as if they aren't as worthy which is pretty sad.  i even see this when it comes to roleplays on here, they'll only allow koreans or kpop idols which really doesn't make any sense. it seems a lot of people forget that asian isn't exlcusive to korean and that asia consists of more than just south korea. 

this kind've turned into a long ramble/vent happy 10 years to me i guess?