I came to fandom at the age of twenty-eight. Delving into parasocial romance past the age of twenty-eight was, and is, a pretty un-reproductive and un-ordinary hobby to disclose. Especially in a patriarchal Korean society, I was expected to get married and make a family instead of spending 1,000,000 won (about 850 dollars) to win the ticket for a fan-signing event of a boy band. I spent whole nights reading fanfiction at 2 a.m. Seeing me, struggling to get into a fan-signing event, my mom and some of my friends asked me with suspicion why I was trying so hard to meet the boys who wouldn’t even remember me at the end of the day. I concede that parasocial relationships leave lots of unrealized expectations behind them. Yet, I declare that the relationships that fans build cannot and should not be dismissed as a “waste.” There are plenty of fangirls out there willing to take the waste.
Do impermanent connections always operate on negativity? They need not. Expanding the analysis of short-lived relationships to the level of intimacy in public, rather than limiting its scope to the dyadic romance, cultivates richer perspectives. We are already familiar with contingent intimacies in public—bonds that do not revolve around the idea of continued commitment but are still capable of nurturing love, solidarity, and affection, while reaching for a shared goal, as in protests and flash mobs.
This essay digs into how fandom practices mobilize ephemerality without blindly eulogizing or sentimentalizing it. As a cultural studies scholar from Seoul, I noticed a cultural practice rooted in the fandom culture that might have something original to say about “fleeting” intimacy: K-Pop birthday events. My analysis of K-Pop birthday events is largely indebted to Lauren Berlant’s idea of intimacy as the affect that refuses a clean division between the public and the private. They argued in their 1998 article that the “inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding publicness.” In particular, Berlant stresses deinstitutionalized forms of intimacy—those that emerge not in legalized and institutionalized domains such as marriage, family, and school, but “on the street, on the phone, in fantasy, at work.” Ephemeral bonding manifesting through K-Pop birthday events reflects this ever-evolving and permeable nature of Berlantian intimacy. Although intermittent and temporary in nature, non-lasting intimacy in public can be transformative—it shows us that strong bonding can coexist with vulnerable spatial and temporal conditions.
The intimacy among fans, who are strangers to one another, lasts only during the event period, ranging from two days to a week. The birthday event serves as an anchor of solidarity, nevertheless: a venue that fosters affection for the celebrity as well as camaraderie among fans by congregating them in the same place—a temporary enclave for anyone chasing the pleasure of fangirling. The event provides the experience of leaving the traces of love for one’s favorite artist(s) and being visible to other fans against the anonymity of the bustling megacity. The birthday café is like a theatrical performance. Once a play is over, the theater will become an empty space, or it will transform into a place for the next play. Your Glinda and Elphaba will not be there for good. Despite this transience, the birthday event makes one thing clear: every year, countless strangers out there can form a collective attachment with you.
This collective attachment can even be cathartic to those who have grown tired of ilko (일코). Ilko is a Korean slang, a contraction of ilbanin (일반인, ordinary person or common people) and cosplay, which ultimately stands for ordinary-person cosplay. As I stressed at the beginning, fangirling is not always viewed in a favorable light, especially if you are a member of a conservative group that believes that enjoying a parasocial relationship with a celebrity past a certain age is immature. For K-Pop fans, birthday cafés engage with world-building, as Berlant would say, that frees individuals from ilko. These places function as shelters where deeply private feelings for one’s favorite star, feelings that produce all sorts of fantasies, can be explored while still remaining “public” spaces, given birthday cafés’ collective nature built on fandom. They preserve “the personal” while encouraging fangirls to bolster relationality between them.
My first experience of a birthday café, or birthday event, referred to as saengka in Korean, came in May 2023. The event was for Gwangil, a drummer of the Korean boy band LUCY, a group I have been fangirling over for more than four years. The coffee shop was located near Hongdae, an acronym for Hongik University Station. Hongdae is one of the most popular neighborhoods for birthday events. A lot of birthday cafés are clustered in Hongdae, Hapjeong, Seongsu, Seoul Forest, and Apgujeong, which are all busy areas in Seoul. It is not uncommon that multiple coffee shops celebrating the birthday of the same artist coexist within one neighborhood. A lot of fans go on a b-day café tour, visiting multiple cafés on the same day, as if they were on a holy-grail quest leading them to an alternate world in which their love for the artist gets protection and respect.
Gwangil’s birthday café was decorated in green with a phrase, “A Letter From May,” evoking the verdant energy of spring. The meticulous curation of the venue organized by a fan, or a few fans, was striking. Despite not being professional designers themselves, the fans do not hesitate to deploy their aesthetic taste to decorate the coffee shop and code it with a uniqueness of their own.
The organizer raises funds with a group of fans, or they even pay out of pocket to rent a coffee shop. This fandom practice might diverge from Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift economy. The fans are well aware that the real artist is not going to show up (on rare occasions they do, to surprise their fans—though not every time). However, the birthday cafés are not established upon economic or emotional reciprocation between fans and artist(s). Ephemeral affinity in birthday cafés is, in fact, established on absence, not presence. Regardless of whether the artist knows the presence of the event or not, the fans enjoy horizontal pleasure, not the glee coming from a vertical relationship between a star and their fans, by organizing the event and inviting other fans to the place. I am not arguing though that the birthday events are completely free from commercialism. Once you enter the café, you need to buy at least one drink to get a seat. The significance lies in the absence of a transactional relationship between the artist and the fans. The birthday events happening every year, although within a short, limited period of time, show that affection can persist outside the norms of a transactional economy.
Nonreciprocal and horizontal affection varies in form. Some visiting fans bring small gifts such as a slice of cake, cookies, hand cream, or fan-made goods for the organizer to express their gratitude for throwing a birthday event. Others bring a large number of homemade stickers for everybody in attendance that have a picture of the artist on them. You can feel free to take some until the goods run out of stock. This voluntary gesture of “giving,” instead of “gift economy,” also evidences a moment in which strangers nourish intimacy anchored in the love for the artist—a common interest serving as the axis for altruistic or non-transactional affection, which ultimately reinforces the solidarity of fandom: random strangers on the streets becoming recognizable as peers. These series of voluntary practices imply that certain forms of intimacy refuse to follow Mauss’s logic of give-and-take.
Some individuals use the birthday café as a site to meet their online fangirl friends in real life. If you have some friends on X, you might arrange a plan to meet them at the café. Intangible relationships could bloom and be bolstered via birthday events, which might help the fans to keep their connections alive much longer. This phenomenon of online friendship transitioning into real life can also work to the organizers’ benefit. When they look for people with whom to throw a birthday event, social media can be a good place for networking. They contact coffee shops together, design and order fan goods together, and decorate the venue as a team. Although the birthday café as a physical space will not last over a week, the informal network formed through the temporary space might transform into a more constant and sustainable form of bonding, nurturing a community cloaked in ephemerality.
Birthday events also reveal that fan community can manifest via mundane practices, as the literary scholar Ju Yon Kim has argued in her book The Racial Mundane (2015). In her analysis of Joy Kogawa’s novel Itsuka (1992) and Velina Hasu Houston’s drama Tea (1987), Kim stresses the “ritualization of everyday activities as a means of performing community” of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans. Going to a coffee shop, ordering and drinking coffee, trading a few words with a friend—nothing could be more quotidian. In a big city, the café is the most ordinary of places. Walk into one and you’ll find people working and chatting.
Building upon Kim’s observation, however, birthday cafés can be a mode of performing intimacy. An ordinary coffee shop turns into a ground of recognition among fans, who are everyday passers-by of Seoul, and a place in which love for an artist accumulates. Because one’s birthday returns every year, the event can be perceived as an annual ritual that shapes an everyday place into the infrastructure of non-transactional intimacy: a recurring ground where love and solidarity can take hold without necessarily positing reciprocation, economic transaction, or institutionalization of community.
One might argue that this returning characteristic of birthday events makes them deviate from Berlant’s notion of intimacy, which emphasizes mobility and contingency. It is true that the “annual” ritual makes the events a different version of durability rather than ephemerality. Even so, the ritual taking place on a regular basis is still affected by transience. Some fans prefer to choose the same coffee shop in which they threw the event the previous year. In other cases, the events also happen at totally different locations with different staff members. The decorations will be different to welcome different guests. The events can feel like imitations of one another, but they will never be the same.
In their book Cruel Optimism (2011), Berlant discusses the “fantasmatic part of the optimism” in the modern world, constituted by “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy.” Thinking about birthday events alongside Berlant’s idea, it occurred to me that the birthday events themselves might be a cruelly optimistic attachment to a celebrity who is not even there. Every year, you return to the ground of fantasy knowing that your loved one will not be there, and you cannot own that person.
This seemingly astute self-reflection has neglected a disjuncture between the birthday events and Berlant’s cruel optimism. Cruel optimism cages you only when you cannot detach from the source of optimism. What I have emphasized is not an attachment to the star but to fangirls beside you, who can recognize you. K-Pop birthday cafés are not the places that merely offer a sense of disappointment or a fanatic form of love. Instead, they effectively demonstrate that disappearance, or impermanence, is no longer a “failure” of community, but a mode of everyday performance, or even ritual, that subtly produces meaningful encounters among “strangers.” If birthday events fail to make you feel enough bonding or pleasure, you do not have to return to this ritual in the following year. Leverage ephemerality. Your star is not going to know about it anyway.
