QRIMOLE – October 2025

It’s time for QRIMOLE, the series where readers ask Kpopalypse questions! Let’s take a look at the mailbag for the last month!

I saw that viviz are coming to Australia in November! Are you going to see them?

Highly unlikely unless I run into a very big pile of money in the near future (and even if I did, I’d more likely throw it on the mortgage). I’ve love to go (even though the show like most k-pop shows will probably be mediocre bullshit that’s 60% miming to backing tracks and 40% talking to the audience like we’re seven years old, let’s be real), but like the vast majority of k-pop groups they’re not coming to my city. Going to a different city to see a show is a bit beyond my means at the moment, once I add up the cost of transport, accomodation, the concert ticket, food, and the fact that I have to skip work and lose income just to find time to do the trip. Even if someone paid for my ticket I’d still lose a ton of money just to go and see it. Nobody pays the way for little old Kpopalypse to go to their show and give them a potentially bad review, you need to be mainstream media with a hand-on-heart promise to “only write good things” to get the red carpet for these things!

Thoughts on this TVXQ deep cut? When I first heard “One and One” by T-Ara, it reminded me of this song.

Just average. I was expecting it to sound a lot more like “One & One” after you hyped it just now! It’s okay I guess but I’m not about to recycle my Absolute First Album.

have you ever talked about this? i find it to be a welcome break from most “live” kpop shows in that it feels infinitely more natural

Tiny Desk concerts are generally always worth checking out if it’s someone you like. With the Korean ones I’m certain that they cheat and pitch-alter the vocals in post production but they’re still worth a listen anyway because sometimes the band arrangements breathe new life into the songs. “Run For Roses” sounds particularly good here.

hi oppar, I really enjoyed your bias list this year! I wish that you and the readers gave more love to Umji’s legs, they are by far the most healthy-looking thighs and calves in all of gfriend so it’s very refreshing to look at.

My question:
could you tell me in how you, as a man, would deal with this kind of situation that I’d rather keep private, or how you go about women’s sexual desires in general considering the context below:
(You don’t have to omit any details you find relevant when you answer btw I just don’t want my question to be out there in the open. You can also include the part in brackets to help the readers get some context)

I’ve edited out a bunch of stuff. The part in brackets:

This lack of consideration of my needs has been quite common during our relationship. I think he’s too self absorbed to pay attention to any of my cues and take the general context in consideration and I can’t help but feel extremely lonely whenever I feel like I’ve been unnoticed like that. I mean, is it asking too much wishing at times that someone recognizes that you need something without having to tell it directly? I know you and your girlfriend seem like the no bullshit if you want it just say it type of person, but for me having to say obvious stuff, especially to a significant person, really turns me off not only sexually but in general.

I really need your perspective as a man who engaged in sexual relationships with several women to know if this is common sentiment among women or if I’m just being spoiled. I think that most women are already expected to promptly take care of stuff and at least for me it feels frustrating to not receive the same kind of care back.

Thank you for reading this far and wish you a nice day!

Unfortunately for you, men are very obvious creatures. I know this is true in my case. Our brains are wired to look at things in a more basic way. Reading between the lines is not something we’re good at. He would not have understood when you said ‘yes’ to thing A that you actually would have preferred thing B that you hadn’t actually directly stated, and yes I know having to directly state things is a drag but that’s what it is to communicate with most men. In the male world, if you didn’t want thing A, don’t say yes to it.

I can tell you’re not used to male style of communication simply by the way you’ve asked this question to me. “You don’t have to omit any details you find relevant when you answer btw I just don’t want my question to be out there in the open.” I read that to myself about five times over and thought “wait, how much am I actually meant to cut out?” Your sophisticated female brain obviously has a plan here or at least some goalposts but to my more basic male brain it would have been easier if you’d just said directly “remove X, don’t remove Y”. I mean personally I find it all to be relevant but I also understand that you don’t want certain things revealed and that’s fine, but it’s also confusing, because where do I draw the line because where does my “desire for relevant information to be included” override your wish to “not have certain salacious things revealed”? It felt too risky to make a determination on. Because of this uncertainty, I’ve erred on the side of caution and just removed everything not bracketed, because I figured that doing anything else was a risk that might make you feel like you regretted asking the question (hopefully you haven’t). I think that’s what a “well-meaning” person with a “male brain” would do, realise that they were basically dumb and just do the safest thing. A more thoughtless or uncaring person with a “male brain” might just not make any edits at all and reveal everything because you said “don’t omit what you find relevant” and “fuck it I find everything relevant, damnit”. Whereas someone with a “female brain” would… well, I don’t know what they’d do exactly, because I don’t have one of those, but if nothing else I think they’d find your request less confusing.

So what I’m trying to say is, you can’t stop men from thinking like men. That’s about as likely as me stopping any woman from thinking like a woman – it’s just not going to happen. The best you can do is find a man who either lucked out and got the female brain (rare) or, who is willing to see the deficiency in his own head and work proactively with you to work around it. There might be ways to work around things, so you don’t have to directly state something. It may require a lot of effort on the part of both parties though and that’s why relationships can be hard. Teach and encourage him to read between the lines a bit, while at the same time trying to be as direct as you can when needed. Of course he has to put in the effort too, it can’t jsut fall on you, you have to meet in the middle somewhere. Or, don’t… and just break up and find someone else who’s better at it. Or not.

I’m trying to put myself out there and make some new friends (the ones I have are beginning to drift right-wing and I don’t like that) but now everyone’s got their circle. I’ve tried chatting and meeting up with people and it’s like folks don’t want to actually make friends? I’ve met so many people who want me to do all the work and chase them all the time, it’s exhausting.
Idk if people have always been like this or if it’s a more recent COVID thing but I’ve met a lot of incredibly selfish people in the recent past and it’s genuinely burning me out. Is it me, am I somehow just not memorable enough? Do I need to keep looking? I don’t know at this point

Imagine asking me about making friends, I’m the unfriendliest cunt alive. But the best way to make friends I find is through a common interest. It kind of forces you to make new circles even if you don’t want to. That’s how I made friends being in bands.

i think the reason why that newjeans for dummies trend was so annoying was that the actual songs attached were such throwaway. usually with no hook at all, just an empty and hollow instrumental with soft singing all the way through. however, in saying this, kpop has suffered many awful trend-riding phases in the last 15 or so years, so my question here is

from a scale of dubstep to synthpop bangers, where does pinkpantheress/newjeans lite rank for u in terms of enjoyability?

Actually there were worse trends in k-pop than dubstep. It was just one of those things that was implemented very badly, most of the time, and I’d put the current NewJeansification of everything on about the same level. This site probably deserves an entire post recapping various k-pop trends.

hullo, could i plz get a more nuanced version of this response that you gave here? thx.

Not sure what you’re fishing for exactly as I think I said exactly what needed to be said, but if I were to put it less crudely, “biology will always triumph over sociology”. People will instantly cast their politics aside when biological urges get involved, because most of that stuff is just for public consumption anyway rather than how they really feel deep down. Talking about all types of politics here. Most people’s political affiliations really just come down to wanting to connect with a certain social group who might feel the same way. It’s easily discarded when there’s some more meaningful connections on the table.

Blur or Oasis?

Pulp outsold.

(Well actually they didn’t, but they should have.)

I think you get the gist with the first 5 mins of the video. Many game remasters are farmed out to 3rd party contractor studios. Else the people who worked on the game originally have moved on from the developer, so it’s pretty much a Ship of Theseus, the beloved in name only (Blizzard comes to mind).

Are you okay putting up with “newer” versions which change the original artistic intent, if that ‘s the only version available to you or Quality of Life of playability, UI, etc is greatly improved? An example of the former is given in the video: Playstation 4/5 players simply don’t have access to the original versions of the Batman: Arkham games and Assassin’s Creeds mentioned in the video essay thanks to a lack of backward compatiblity with PS3 games. An example of QoL being WAY greater than the OGs would be notably be remastered RTS games like Age of Empires 2 and Total War: Rome.

Do you also get this phenomena with music? Eg maybe entire generations have no idea how a mono album was supposed to sound thanks to thinks like stereo remixes and the Loudness War?

When it comes to games I don’t really care, graphics mean so little to me that it’s not a concern if they change stuff or don’t. I wouldn’t have even noticed the colour of the moon in a fucking Batman game, let alone pondered what it meant artistically, not that I’ve even played that game. But as long as I can actually play the game if I choose to (or not), the rest is just whatever. Wasted effort for me personally, the only benefit for me with remasters is if the original has trouble running but the remaster improves compatibility. So I’ll talk about music instead.

The very first remasters, and in fact to my recollection the very first use of the word remaster to promote anything at all, was the Led Zeppelin remaster album from around 1990, essentially a “greatest hits” type album. The remasters certainly did sound good, but here’s the thing: so did the originals. Led Zeppelin, regardless of what you think of the music itself, had some of the very best production quality of the 1970s, those records still sound modern even today. If there was one band’s catalogue that really didn’t need remastering at all, it was probably either theirs or Pink Floyd’s. There was plenty of other music from that era that really could have used a remaster much more, but of course most of those records people don’t care about anymore, whereas Led Zeppelin still makes money, so that’s why we get popular remasters instead of the remasters we probably need.

question from a diehard atheist: do you think there are religious songs, especially in genres like metal, rock and pop, that don’t suck ass? i’m not talking about sneaking in a reference to the gospel or whatever, i mean full on “PRAISE JESUS/ALLAH/BUDDHA/”, like more explicitly religious than Lovebites’ Glory to the World (which tbh rips)

Generally I find religious music sucks for the same reason that neo-Nazi music sucks. The people making it are so caught up in making sure it conveys the message that they want to send as the number one priority, that they tend to let that messaging compromise the actual music. The only times it’s ever worked for me, was stuff like Lovebites where the religion is approached as part of the “art concept” rather than something that they’re trying to get the audience to actually believe in. Here’s another example:

Although I am partial to Kristin Hersh’s “Holy Single” where she does gospel covers on acoustic guitar… or something, I don’t know. The songs on it are good, but I don’t like it when anyone else does these same songs, only her, because her arrangements are great.

Is this a common sentiment, Australian companies discouraging NZ gigs?

I saw Sabaton (Swedish power metal band) and it was their first ever NZ concert in the 25 years of their existence. They said that they tried several times in the past to add a NZ gig to the the tours but the Aussie promoters would refuse, saying that nobody would come. Tickets for this gig sold out in a day! They added a 2nd night based on the demand.

P.S. I hadn’t heard of Daniel Champagne prior. Is he a big deal in Australia?

I’ve never heard of him either.

Promoters telling artists to skp New Zealand, yes it’s common and it happens for the same reason that bands who do tour Australia won’t come to my city – promoters deem it a risky place to play, they don’t want to take the risk just in case it flops and they lose money, whereas Sydney and Melbourne are considered “safe bets”. The same promoters who are saying “Don’t go to Auckland” are also saying “skip Adelaide, go directly to Perth, or just play the east coast of Australia only”. Very frustrating, because often these promoters get proven wrong. I mean, I’m sure they’re right sometimes too… but it sucks when people won’t take chances even though I do understand the economics behind why they don’t.

Do you know Chvrches? Scottish synth-pop band. Their song Clearest Blue played during this gay kiss scene and I became a big fan ever since.

Yes I am aware of them. Not really into them.

What do you think of music during sex? Personally I despise it, I think it takes away from one of the best aspects of it, being able to hear your partner in one of their most vulnerable states, just washes away the intimacy and specialness of it y’know?

I don’t completely hate it, I mean if it enhances the experience for her then sure, why not, I don’t mind it, but it’d be for her benefit only. I personally prefer to listen to music at times when I can actually devote my full attention to the music. Also if I have music going because I’m a musician I might feel tempted to do movements in time to it which could be devastating under certain conditions.

What is the SEXIEST K-pop song you heard? Like red lipstick, candles, lingere, long make-out sessions, no protection type of sexy.

Just looking at it purely sonically, I don’t think miss A’s “Touch” has ever been beaten.

can i send you a labubu

Send one to Asian Junkie, he needs them more than me.

would you still like your girlfiend if she turned into a labubu

I’d send her to Asian Junkie’s house to say hello.

do you think this is good music?

The day Asian Junkie made his last post on his website to date: 22nd July 2025.

The day this Labubu video came out: 26th July 2025.

I think there’s a connection, folks.

is it even possible for a legacy act to release a good album? listened to the new pulp and it wasn’t necessarily bad, i actually really like the first track, but there’s just kinda no point to it when i’m better off just listening to regular pulp. or am i just using an excuse to tour and mine nostalgia dollars too seriously?

Yeah it’s rare but it happens. Celtic Frost’s last album after they reformed decades after their original split was their best one. R.A. The Rugged Man is so much better now than in the 90s that his early style is almost unrecognisable as him.

dude please help. what genre even is this song. is it turkish inspired (the guitars), is it blues??? jazzy??? cant wrap my head around it. for context the singer is balkan romani, which would explain oriental infleunces but then some parts sound spanish even?? pls help cause u know more music theory than i do

I’d just call this pop music personally, with a little bit of what I assume is his native Romanian folk style mixed in with contemporary incluences like bluess, jazz, disco etc. A lot of pop music sounded like this in the 1970s, kind of a mash of all the styles that were popular at that time.

Have you heard “Love me or Leave me” by DAY6? I think you should hear “Love me or Leave me” by DAY6 and tell me why it sounds so good.

That acoustic guitar intro sounds almost exactly like… another song, I can’t remember which one. But that chord progression is super common. It is actually decent, what I like a lot about it is some of the drum patterns, repeating-snare patterns in rock songs are cool and remind me of Nick Cave’s “Henry’s Dream” album and bunny-album-era Swans, I always like that sort of thing. They help lift it above being derivative for me I guess. Also just the fact that it’s fairly upbeat in general and sticks with the parts that make it catchy – it’s good.

how do you feel about this song? i’ve loved it since i was a kid but i can’t tell if it holds any actual merit or if i’m just blinded by nostalgia. i’ve also always had a fetish for robot girls so that could be part of it

This is shit. You just want to fuck robot girls a whole lot. Select your lube carefully.

Whaddya think about this song? It’s C-pop.

“What do you think about non-kpop-song X” is frankly a waste of a QRIMOLE question because I can tell you these songs suck a lot quicker via my new ask thingy. This is horrible, total dogshit, somehow even worse than the j-robot song.

have you heard the demo to aespa’s ‘rich man’?

I’m genuinely confusing why they would water down the instrumental… what are your thoughts on that decision? because i really really really don’t get it, the demo is so much more interesting.

SM are very strange in that they always want to “polish things up”, it’s unfortunate because the demo version of “Rich Man” is clearly superior. It’s that Korean pop obsession with trying to make everything perfect and pristine to make sure “we beat the competition for sure” and sometimes not recognising the value of a few rough edges.

I’m curious to see your opinion on some of these artists (even though only one of them is Korean and none of them are kpop eehh whatever).
The artists are:
– Jane Remover, if you don’t know her already I recommend her song “Movies For Guys” to get an idea on how most of her songs sound like, but sometimes she gets more shoegazey (see, “Census Designated”) or more electropop (see, ” Dancing With Your Eyes Closed).
– Nastyona, Korean jazz-rock/piano rock band, if you don’t know them then I’d recommend their album “Another Secret” or if you don’t want to listen to a whole album, then just “My September”.
– Boris, Japanese noise rock/drone metal band, they’ve got a few different sounds, I think they’re best when they’re doing noise rock stuff (see their album “Pink”, especially the title track), but they’ve done some more post rock stuff (see the 40 minute 5 part suite ” Feedbacker ” or the slightly longer “Flood”) or sometimes they go down drone lane (see, Amplifier Worship, which has one of the most ridiculous album covers I’ve ever seen).
– Kero Kero Bonito, they’re a British synthpop band but I like them more when they go down slightly noisier territory (if you want a taste of their more electronic side then listen to some songs off of their ” Bonito Generation” album I would recommend “Trampoline” and if you want some of their noisier stuff I’d recommend their album “Time N Place” , a stand out song from that album is “Only Acting”).

Jane Remover is good, I like it. Hadn’t heard this before. Checked out a few songs, really good arrangements and production, genuinely different. Will listen to more when I have time (probably 2027 hahaha).

Nastyona are okay, I didn’t mind this. A bit too jazz leaning and conservative for my liking and not sure if I’d want to check out more but it’s alright.

Boris were the only group I was already very well aware of. Never really was able to fully get into them, however some bands I was in back in punk days had bandmates who loved the shit out of this band and that’s how I found out about them. I always felt like they had the right idea but just lacked songs.

Kero Kero Bonito I think maybe I’ve heard their stuff before but unsure, wasn’t able to remember any of it so maybe not. Skimming tracks they are hit and miss but the good songs are really good, agree that “Only Acting” is great and the more guitar-based direction suits them better, probably because it balances better against the “cutesiness” thing they have going on than synths or whatever.

Thanks for the recs!

3 person developed Australian indie game Hollow Knight: Silksong released onto Steam a few days ago and has been a massive success. It reportedly crashed Steam, Nintendo Switch and Playstation shops from ppl trying to buy it all at once. It had over 500k concurrent users on Steam a couple days after release. Anyway there’s a current discourse amongst shill gaming press + other indie developers that it might set precedent for user expectations by dropping a ~80ish hour game for only $20 USD (they spent like 7 years developing it). Their competitors + shill journalists are upset that users might come to expect high quality, long games for only $20 USD. Another criticism is that they only announced the game’s release date two weeks ahead, not letting their competition plan their releases around it.

Your thoughts on this discourse?

IMO this is competitive market, they zero obligation to their competition. Prioritising their players getting a good deal is a fantastic gesture.

I don’t really play new high budget games anyway so none of this discourse is something I give a shit about. I think it’s fine for developers to do whatever, the market will decide what is worthwhile. Hollow Knight: Silksong doesn’t drastically appeal to me as a game but then neither does the shit big companies put out – if some devs somewhere are making bank that’s great, it’s hard to get ahead in game dev. Generally I agree with you.

Why do you like 5050s starry night sooooo much?

I don’t think it’s the best song ever or even the best Fifty Fifty song but it’s certainly above average, we could all listen to it a little more, yes we could hey here it is:

But the real thing is that this song has been the subject of some… ah, fuck it, my jokes are no fun if I have to explain them. Just stream this some more. Or don’t, I don’t care.

Has the celebration, jubilee, and shameless approval of Charlie Kirk’s assassination by the online left affected you? We’ve known online kpop fans are largely brain rotted, mentally ill freaks for over a decade now, but the sheer volume and widespread non condemnations — ranging from ecstasy to performative apathy — is more than I expected. It’s disturbing. And it’s not just the volume of posts, it’s the 100ks of likes that prove this is not a small fraction of the left that supports political gun violence when it suits them. It’s significant. I know you’re Australian and not on Twitter anymore, but it’s truly a cesspool out here. And it’s not just Twitter, it’s every platform. From people I thought were normal and not sociopaths. Political assassinations are rarely a winning strategy, this is not Harry Potter where you kill Voldy and the whole thing crumbles. And they didn’t even kill Voldy, they got like Bellatrix. Only in a true dictatorship can it work (still a long shot), and no matter how much insane people screech Hitler about orange man, it’s just laughable that the man is even in the same galaxy as the painter. This is not a winning strategy and if this culture isn’t purged from the left, I see many conservative victories in the future, at least in national American elections. Killing your political opposition is only a solution in a literal war, and that seems to be where these people want to go but have no idea what that means. They’re so blind in belief of their righteousness they don’t see that the other side can start shooting at people they deem to say evil things too. Where do you see this going?

I didn’t know who Charlie Kirk was before he got shot and I was happy not knowing. Sure, we all hate these dickheads turning up at campuses to debate first-year University students to try and farm the dumbest ones by DESTROYING them in debates for clicks, but the answer to that isn’t violence. All it’s done is given the far-right a martyr, that’s not a good thing. Idiotic political pundits should be ignored, or better yet laughed at, but not assassinated. The KKK was quite a popular organisation if you go back 100 years but what ended up thinning their ranks significantly wasn’t anti-KKK violence (hate groups, as it happens, are quite good at dealing with violence) but people making constant jokes about them. After a while it didn’t seem so cool to run around with a bag on your head doing secret handshake stuff anymore. That’s why I always make jokes about things rather than serious rants. I don’t have a massive “Burning Sun was such a BAAAAAD thing, gosh it’s so important that you know how BAAAAD it was” rant anywhere on my website, but what I do have is hundreds of little jokes dotted everywhere taking the piss and making the guilty people look like fools, in various posts, in computer games, and so on. That’s how I tackle any issue that I care deeply about, it’s more fun for me to write, it’s more entertaining for you to read, and I think it also gets the message across much more effectively than the online equivalent of pitching a tent in someone else’s backyard holding up a “change my mind” sign.

Are you gonna do a boy band tierlist?

I want to but I haven’t found a good one yet. I looked at one that had over 100 boy bands in it including a bunch I couldn’t even remember the songs of, but it didn’t have the majority of the rare boy bands that I’d actually put in higher tiers. It seems people making these things have short memories, or maybe there just really are that many boy groups. Not much of a list if half are going to be C or less and the other half of them are going in the “can’t even remember what they sound like” tier…

Listen… I was surprised when you said “Hot Hot Hot” was you favourite TVXQ song, I thought “Rising Sun” would be it instead as it is more progressive and energetic and overall more powerful and gritter. This live version may change your mind, the last part has heavy metal guitarwork and I think d-beats. Super cool.

Covered here.

I’ve heard about autotune setting a new standard for young singers on how to sound (in the pop world at least), so I would think the other lesser-known effects are doing the same.

Are people (the idols that aren’t getting vocal-souped) reproducing things like drive and saturation as an intentional part of their timbre?

My understanding of those two effects are that they add grit, attack, fullness (like a quality of hitting some kind of “maximum”), which singers definitely have. What comes to mind is punk/metal screaming technique, but obviously kpop, being pop, has much more conservative standards.

Someone that comes to mind is Spica’s Bohyung (especially the hitting-maximum quality), but obviously I’ve never heard her raw.

Here’s her taking a song request on a live. I’m assuming there’s no post-production (it’s a livestream on a phone…), but she’s also pretty close to a phone mic.

She honestly sounds pretty consistent to her appearances with heavy post-production.

How much of it is her own timbre, how much of it is a feature of tech (like hitting max SPL on a mic, or compression)?

Short answer about drive/saturation is no. I assume you mean someone maxing out the input of a mic and pushing into the ‘red zone’, an engineer might decide to do that to get a certain effect on a track, but this is not something that a singer in the Korean pop realm would make part of their vocal style. Not a singer like Bohyung anyway. Singers like her who actually can sing really well, usually have no interest in tech at all, but to what extent they do have interest it’s just in making their voice sound as clear as possible. So if Bohyung sounded like she was overloading the gain in the studio, she’d be more likely to instinctively back off a bit because that’s what vocalists who use microphones a lot train themselves to do – avoid distortion. Singers who can sing to Bohyung’s standard (i.e good) if they want compression at all they almost universally want “nice” compression (gain-riding) but they don’t want “nasty” compression (distortion).

As for a singer who does want a “breakup” kind of sound (which is generally restricted to punk singers, or more experimental stuff like Mike Patton, or Tom Waits, or even Alice Longyu Gao, rather than “singer’s singers”) they wouldn’t usually try to reproduce it raw on the mic, they’d let the engineer do the work. It’s a lot easier to boost a signal that’s been recorded so it breaks up, than it is to record that breakup at the source. The reason why is because if you go too much as an engineer, you can always back off a bit, but as a vocalist if you distort the mic too hard and it sounds a bit too much you can’t “take it back”, you just have to record it again. In audio engineering we call this “destructive processing” vs “non-destructive processing”. A non-destructive process is one where the original signal is still pure and all the impurities are added later (and thus can be removed or chaged). Unless you’re absolutely certain about what sound you’re going for and know your equipment well enough to not overdo it, it’s always better to do things “non-destructive” just because it gives you more options for adjusting the sound, whereas a destructive edit is irreversible, more or less. Once you add salt to food, you can only add more salt, you can’t take salt away.

Bohyung is consistent between the phone recording and the onstage recording and that’s a sign of a singer who doesn’t need lipsync or other crutches. The people who can’t sing are the ones who go to seed when the safety rails are taken away. What you’re hearing is her own timbre. Vocalists like her do not really fuck with signal processing, they’d be more likely to pride themselves on NOT using it, that is, if they even have any awareness of it at all (which depends on their level of studio expoerience, usually).

Yeah, there’s a lot hypocrisy in comes to the treatment/portrayal of males in entertainment and fiction.

For years male rape in Hollywood movies has been treated as a punchline (and still is). Eg comedy film “Dude, Where’s My Car?”, when the protagonists get raped by KKK members whilst unconcious. Season 4 of “The Boys” where Huey gets tied down and exploited by the S&M fetishist Batman stand-in. Same show made a huge deal of how it was wrong that female hero Starlight was forced to give fellatio to Aquaman stand-in The Deep, sheer hypocrisy.

One of the reasons for the prevalence of Mary Sues in fiction is because in recent years people have been afraid to portray women with flaws. They’re afraid of being wokescolded by fiction police Karens on social media and/or in the media. So we end up boring characters who have nothing to overcome. If there is a character arc is often A. Mary Sue realises she had the great power within her all along, or B. people around her learn of how special she is.

My point is with bringing up the Mary Sue is because nobody is afraid to portray male characters in negative lights (unless they’re gay), like the incompentent oaf Homer Simpson archetype from US sitcoms or just straight out evil villains.

It’s always been an insidious and horrible cultural thing that if you’re a man and you get raped it’s your fault and you deserve it because you’re supposed to be a man which means being tough enough to stop people from raping you. So you get a double-whammy of victim blaming, because not only did you “ask for it” but you’re now marked as “weak” and that’s your fault too, of course. I think this is why so few male rapes get reported, and reporting of female rapes is quite low as well for a whole bunch of reasons but I bet it’s even less common for men.

The Mary Sue stuff makes sense.

None of this was a question so JAV of the Month is the very wholesome and non-rapey GRABD-014.

Hwang Minwoo (aka Little Psy) released this song around two months ago and I think it may be even worse than Showtime, (but thats kind of like being the shortest dwarf)

Covered here.

Also not a question, so JAV of the Month is also CKCK-001.

I don’t know if you’ve ever reviewed it, but heat are your thoughts on Drama by 9muses

Seriously folks, you can just wait for this stuff to be inevitably covered in roundup. Don’t use QRIMOLE for questions like this. As it happened I covered it here, and I didn’t talk about the song much but I did generally imply that it’s good, which it is. Not their best song (because if it was, it would have hit favourites lists back in the day, but it wasn’t so it didn’t) but decent enough.

If you want to know what I think of a song, it’s always worth doing a search first using the search bar on the website. Write it like “artist – song” (not case sensitive) and don’t forget the quotes, with the quotes around it the search facility will search for the exact entire string rather than each word individually. If you do it right, the song’s appearance in roundup will appear, if there was one.

What are your top 3 f(x) bsides?

I won’t answer this because questions about k-pop album tracks are boring, but also because it’ll save me repeating myself – some f(x) album reviews are coming up soon on this site, so you’ll get some answers at that time.

I still enjoy some kpop groups and songs and still consider myself a kpop fan, but lately I’ve been watching old performances of groups and listening to some older songs and albums and it just feels like there were better songs and performers in general. It might just be that I’m nostalgic about a very specific period in kpop history but some songs and performances just sound better to me? Ik it’s pop music, but it feels like companies put a little bit more effort into the training and the music part of it. How do you feel about current (4th-5th gen) kpop artists and songs as opposed to 2nd and 3rd gen artists and songs? (I’m excluding the 1st gen kpop because I’m not a huge fan, as I can’t get past the production in a lot of those songs 😬)

We only tend to remember the good stuff from history and forget all the crap. There were some real waste of space songs in second gen and most people have forgotten that they existed – but I haven’t, that’s why I keep lists.

K-pop hasn’t gotten way worse, it’s just changed over time. In a decade (when we might finally hit fifth gen for real, which we’re not in yet) you’ll look back on the mid-2020s with nostalgia and remember how good you had it, because you’ll remember the dozen or so songs you really liked and have forgotten all the poop.

For the reader asking for content creators reviewing K-pop dances, check out Ploopy 678! She posts regular reels where she rates dances in terms of difficulty and explains why, and she also has dances per group sorted from easiest to hardest.

I’m a big fan of Ploopy678 and we’ve corresponded on Twitter a bit in the past. I know she does dance ratings on Instagram, I don’t know shit about dancing so I can’t vouch for how accurate she is, but she does actually perform the dances that she rates so I’m going to go out on a limb and say that she probably does know her shit a bit more than most people.

hi kpopalypse, what’s your favourite drama/show?

I don’t really watch TV shows or dramas, except these dramas. Too much writing to do!

You get the gist of it in the first 3 mins.

I get his point of not being nice towards people who dance on the graves of others and call for political violence but I wanna know what was he expecting? It’s a fact that conversatives have been targeted for cancellation campaigns and censorship by social media platforms for at least 10 years now, yet he was still posting using on social media under his real name and face photo. Dude should’ve known better, FAFO.

People being selectively dumb a common thing seems to be a common thing I’ve noticed. Like actual racists getting mad that they’ve gotten their Steam account banned or whatever cuz they went on Steam forums and/or posting user reviews filled with obviously racial slurs and dehumanising diatribes.

This reminds me of when I saw a YouTube video of some guy who had a bee in his bonnet about pronouns in email signatures. His whole argument was that since you don’t actually use pronouns in emails themselves, it shouldn’t matter. For instance if you were writing an email to me, you wouldn’t call me “he” or “her” or any other pronoun because that’s not how English grammar works in emails generally speaking, you’d just call me “Kpopalypse” or “hey, asshole” or whatever. Therefore according to him it was irrelevant to have the pronouns there because they served no function in email writing, other than being woke or whatever. That’s a silly argument because I always thought the idea of the pronoun in the email signature isn’t that it makes writing emails easier but that it saves that awkward pronoun conversation when you meet the person in real life. I thought right-wingers might actually like pronouns in emails because then at least they’re much less likely to accidentally misgender people, something they seem to be forever afraid of being ostracised for.

Hello! This is my first time ever asking a question on here.

My question is, what are your thoughts on “The Dean of American Rock Critics” Robert Christgau? Do you respect him for being one of the few critics to help make rap/hip hop and pop music be taken seriously? What are your thoughts on his infamous writing style, do you feel you both overlap in terms of taste and critique?

I ask this because there are some uncanny similarities between the both of you, for example:

Both of you are highly polarising amongst your respective communities, hated by many—liked by few. Both of you are hard to impress, the music you both enjoy vexes people more than the music you hate. Though your prose is nowhere close to being as pretentious and sesquipedalian as Christgau’s. Full concentration, esoteric knowledge and being well read is occasionally required to understand some of your reviews. Sardonic one liner jokes is a characteristic also found in the reviews of both of you.

That is all, I’d be very intrigued to hear what a notoriously hard to impress figure thinks of another notoriously hard to impress figure.

Thanks for reading!

I’ve never heard of him, so I went to his website, which is a web designer’s nightmare and looks like it hasn’t had a facelift since about 1997. I didn’t mind his writing style, he’s quite an entertaining read, but what’s really obviously missing from what he does is any actual knowledge of music. He literally talks about everything else. Sure, I do the same and talk tons of shit in my crappy roundup reviews and elsewhere, but press me on the musical content and I can tell you, in exact terms that focus on sonics and disregard all other factors, why I like something (or don’t) and I can tell you that in either music-theoretical speak or more reader-friendly for-the-layperson speak. Christgau doesn’t do either one. Just to pick one random example, but you can find many others on his site, his writing on Ice Cube’s “Death Certificate” album is all about politics, race, misogyny… fine, but what are the songs like? Did he even listen to them or just read the lyrics sheet and read some interviews? When he does finally get forced to talk about music a little like in this PJ Harvey review he says typical go-nowhere music-critic things like “the tunes (are) welcoming and even expansive”… what? That sort of statement means literally jack fucking shit in actual musical terms. It’s the same problem that k-pop music reviewers have, they don’t really know much about music so they don’t know how to talk about music, so they just make shit up using adjectives that don’t have actual meaning, because it reads okay on paper to a readership that knows even less. Music-critic-speak.

What I like about him the most is that his opinion is clearly his own and he follows all types of music without regard to trends, that’s definitely good. But for someone obviously so interested in music as to devote all this time to writing about it, but to hardly ever discuss the music itself in any real terms throughout, that’s frustrating. I feel like Christgau is trying to do something very different to what I’m trying to do, and so that’s why his writing, while entertaining and well written, rubs me the wrong way a bit. This video might be relevant as it explains my point of view on writing song reviews, why I do it.

I don’t think Christgau is on the same page as me as this, I think he wants you to consider his opinion actually important. It’s not any more or less important than my own, or yours. Music is subjective, and people need to realise it, especially these days. Hopefully what I write helps people with fandom groupthink resistance, and gives them the confidence to say what they think without worrying what the k-pop hive mind might say. Here’s hoping.

That’s all for this episode of QRIMOLE! This series will return next month!

Oh, and do you have a question that you’d like to see answered in the next episode of QRIMOLE? If so, use the question box below, or if no box appears, click the Qri on the sidebar to open the box as a separate webpage! Kpopalypse will return!