Rena just slayed! Rena bring that FACTS 
Apart from aesthetic and promotional aspect, i don’t see how we can compare the visual kei and K-pop. Musically, it’s like compare a 90’s Boys-Band (Worlds Apart) and 80’s glam rock/metal (Mötley Crüe), it’s off-topic for me. I love vk while i find K-pop insipid and overrated. Sorry, if i’m rough but i can’t imagine that a die-hard fan could turn his back on vk for the K-pop.
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you’re talking about maybe 30 % western fans if my vk/jrock circles of ~2005-2010 (after which i more or less gradually drifted away from vk fandom irl / outside of MH → JRO, but not vk itself), are an indication. those 30 % + tumblr/twitter/tiktok anime fans + asian youths living in the west are the core kpop fanbase.
based off my previous estimate, roughly 50 % of western vk fans at its short peak are reg variety metalheads looking to score horny unhinged gothpuxxi, and this is the type that bands like Deg, versailles, unsraw and the rest of korn-kei, angry early MUCC, would tour for. the other 10 % are diehard delulu type who think they’re yoshiki’s soulmate and Aoi’s baby from Kohta, nursed and raised by miyavi, and while I know that they have to exist, I prefer staying away, mostly because there’s some overall very low IQ, and the most grounded hardcore VK people don’t typically live through their senpai or whatever the weeb word is for their dissociative coping.
asian fans would be an entirely different thing, and I’m not familiar with them enough to have an opinion, but most of them don’t overlap with the western fanbase a lot, and they get to eat live-limited gazette curry first, anyway.
there’s a % of fans carrying the “i’m SO novel and rare…” factor in both, and they overlap and make a certain impression of both scenes… which with kpop is a bit of a kii because most of what they consume over there is just sped-up n’sync swill, meowed through in korean, most of the time.
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Sorry but babymetal is just based on a japanese fetish that small cute girls make “crazy music”. I can show you multiple AV covers of this, from before the era of Babymetal. And of course they were under 15 when they debuted. To cater to the ped… And of course even the name includes “baby”…
I have lived in Japan 20+ years and I hate to say how much of everything in the japanese society/entertainment biz that involves cute girls, is based on some kind of fetish. I am not saying that for example americans are saints and sex isn’t a big part of the entertainment biz there, but you wouldn’t believe how much sexual tension there is behind EVERYTHING in Japan. I don’t prefer to talk about this but “visual kei” gay porn is one of the biggest gay porn genres in Japan. Its not common that band members of failed bands end up going there, since they get offers all the time and its always big money.
I think its said that 5000 porn videos are released every month from Japan. Thats 166 a day. I would say its sad how many women sell themselves short, their dignity 
There must be many not so happy parents…
Now I feel I have derailed it but babymetal just started from a bunch of various fetishes and I hate to say it to you, it wouldn’t surprise me if the girls would be offered to do bikini videos as 14 year olds if the project failed, and then invites to AV debuts later and a few hundred man (money).
But it succeeded and gained fame abroad. Good for them!
I have said this many times but the darkness of the japanese society is… dark. 闇が深いぞ.。Behind all those happy happy videos you might find from the country, people are suffering mentally, everyday in the morning there are always like 10+ announcements only for one train line with the announcement of “we have stopped momentarily due to an injury”. The worst I have seen with my own eyes was that a man jumped and one part of him flew so fast somehow from the impact and hit a women in the face, and she fell into coma after that. I was at the scene and it felt unreal. Every hour of the day 5-6 people do the worst decision. Its said every a majority of all men live their full lives without being in a relationship with a woman even once etc… I can go on. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Now this post is full of negativity and I apologize for that. But dont be scared of Japan, its the perfect country to visit for tourism and partying, but living there? Think again.
I appreciate all the answers and there are some really good ones in there as well, full of good, while maybe a bit harsh information, but the reality is harsh.
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Yeah that’s what I’m saying - lolita fashion was always supposed to be anti-creeper, so I don’t believe for a second that Babymetal were created to be pedobait
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Misogyny and disrespect for the band’s musical work. What you define only shows how sexist you are, even trying to explain the reasons for what you said. Your comment is very unfortunate!
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Do you hear what your even saying? the words your typing on your keyboard can you read them? no I’m being serious sex hasn’t been part of American enterianment bussiness for over a decade now. American’s don’t look at female musicans/artists/actors with the mind set of wishing to bang them in the bedroom or how sexy they would look in thin clothing we look at them as “oh wow, look what a female can accomplish that’s amazing my daughter can be like you”
The mind set that the enterainment bussniess is just sex and drugs is over a decade if not cenutry old and people have worked serverly hard to get past that look at what Taylor Swift and other female musicans and artists have accomplished there fan base isn’t “ah, I wonder what she looks like in the bedroom”
The aftermath of a Visual Kei artist is always massive because, many people dream since childhood to become a rock star but often times end up as some office worker or a dead end nobody job so getting to see them is like “OH WOW! what was it like? did you enjoy it? what as your fans like” people are fansnated by that kind of job
…the police in any country would like a word now.
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People like to refer to that very old creepy lolita book as where the term “lolita” and the style of clothing came from but, the guy in the book liked how child-like she dressed it plays on the very digusting views that “if there the age of consent then, what is the problem with dressing them child-like”
…cause the point of the clothing is to keep creeps away not draw them in who or what would wish to draw in digusting creeps?!
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you might want to double-check that with azealia bank’s IG stream archive account on youtube… as a starting point
gurl I’m always here for a good ragetype, but you’re very naive.
people who were sexually abused as children generally over-sexualize themselves as adults, particularly if they are not aware of the impression it is making on occasional observers of their behavior. it’s a rather sad and an extremely well studied subject, and trauma-induced attitude can’t be seen through the reference point of someone who went through healthy OR coddled maturing timeline.
There a darker side to the entertainment industry that’s always existed and still does it’s why artists always have to fight for there rights etc but the person was trying to aruge that while sex is a big part of the american entertainment industry in Japan it’s the base behind everything
I don’t really listen to American artists so I thought it was a thing that only existed in the past sad, it’s still going
That is very sadly true but Baby Metal didn’t dress in lolita for those reasons the band wasn’t created for Baroque very one sided crazy mind set.
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I don’t know what market they were targeting originally, but pictures of their western live crowd a few years ago made me quite uncomfortable literally because so many of men attending looked twice the age of performers and were giving off a turbo-charged str8 incel vibe. I don’t even remember if there were any women (a couple animegurlie-looking ones?.. or am I imagining things now just to fill in the image?..)
considering how creepy and exploitative the idol industry is seen to this day, idt their domestic stans are much better
the only thing I can say in their defense is that their formula worked out and they’re evidently brining in good cash, which can’t be said about a lot of other artists who attempt to break into music, particularly, female ones.
and I mean what part of the original post, semantics aside, do you factually disagree with? there’s no feminist rewording of problematic angles and the text comes off as quite dry, but literally the gay porn thing alone is wide known, not all bandmen even hide their participation in that.
jonny’s jpoop agency had a male casting coach tabloid scandal like this decade, and I really doubt everyone else over there is being as curtsy and timid irl as their stage persona is suggesting.
I’m not trying to say you’re wrong on all counts STAT!!! or whatever;
if anything, your own peace of mind should be a priority online, but calling someone out on dishing out in a thread that was created for more sobering kind of talk already invites further response.
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That statement is crazier than anything Baroque has said.
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Baroque’s take might not be popular, but there is definitely a nugget of truth there.
Virtually any female idol group in Japan is targeted at an audience primarily of grown ass men. Yes, even the teen/pre-teen ones. The problem isn’t as noticeable over here, because I don’t think that a lot of Western listeners even register that Babymetal are an idol group. They think that they just really loved metal, and hired a backing band and wrote all the music and choreographed their own dances and made it all on their own. They’re not thinking about it much further than “OMG. Little girls doing metal screams. How br00tal”.
It’s incredibly gross when men in the audience decide to fetishize the performers, especially when they’re underage. But the support of those perverts is also how a lot of idol groups make most of their money and the industry knows it.
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Same and this is the reason despite BiS being a huge influence on my music/visual taste and Pour Lui being one of my most respected musicians, i don’t knooowwww if i could ever get myself to have gone to any of their shows, or BiSH’s or any other idol group’s, bc of the company i’d be in, judging from liveshow photos & videos
I think blaming women for the sexualization and fetishization that gets put on them is really shitty (not trying to argue against anyone in particular, just saying)
I used to read a lot of interviews she’d give, back when i had the time for this sort of thing lol
(For context, she’s not babymetal but her group BiS was also an idol group w/ punk, metal, and sometimes vkei backing)
Iirc the group came about as a way for her to voice her displeasure that she felt her band wasn’t taken seriously, and that being an upstart female singer didn’t have any onramps into the industry except idol. So she started her own group as protest, doing almost the opposite of what idols were “allowed” to do at every chance, at tremendous burdens to her and her rotating group of co-idols’(?) careers, comfort, & safety
But now indie alt-idol is a whole bubble of a genre not imho too dissimilar from vkei, and there’s that established mode of expression that wasn’t really there before BiS. I’ve heard proper idol groups do covers of their song Nerve from time to time, and BiS’s efforts at getting noticed allegedly brought some degree more freedom and autonomy.
All this to say! I think idol can look very strange to outsiders, just as vkei does, and i don’t enjoy that genre any myself. But thru following BiS and the vocalists of other affiliated groups, it’s a lot easier for me to appreciate how much the musicians are doing for their scene same as vkei guys do for ours.
And like the whoever posted those thirsty Toshiya thighs or whatever posts… it’s not like sexploitation is only a thing in idol. But somehow men don’t get shamed and blamed (as they shouldn’t!) for the worst practices in the industry falling on them, but women do for how they dress and sing.
Proper idol shit like akb48 isn’t for me, i’ve never enjoyed it or cared for it, but that doesn’t mean i should convince myself it has no musical/artistic value to anyone; doesn’t mean the artists making it are any less of artists than my favs in my scene
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I have a new unpopular opinion for you all.
This came to my mind when people were complaining about the ticket prices of Jiluka’s oversea concerts and because there is a lot of “vk is dying” talk here all the time.
So… if you want vk and oversea shows etc, you have to pay for it. You have to buy merch and music (not just stream it). I get that some people just don’t have the money but I am pretty sure there are people who complain about prices who can aford it.
Hobbies do cost money and artists have to make at least some money from it. You wouldn’t work for free, would you? The best support you can give to your faves is to buy their shit.
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agree & i’d add also specifically cheki, if they sell them, if your goal is to get as much of your spent money into the hands of the artist as possible without just straight up donating
there’s cuts of everything going everywhere, maybe there’s even cuts of cheki sales getting distributed, but they’ve certainly got the cheapest manufacturing cost relative to sales price out of just about anything a music artist could sell!
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So, from which sites do y’all buy your stuff? Since I only recently dove back into VK, I’d be happy for some advice on this topic.
Which were your experiences with different shops?
I think we have a tvread about proxy service experiences. Most of them work well. There are some that can get stuff from more places so.
If you don’t want to use proxys there are of course sites that sell japanese stuff. Depends on your region which one to use.
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Here is the proxy service thread, if you’re interested.
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