It seems like k-pop fans have been feeling very negative lately about a lot of things.  Perhaps it’s the war in Ukraine, perhaps it’s the COVID, or perhaps it’s because your k-pop bias still doesn’t get enough lines, but whatever the reason, Kpopalypse is back to help with more POSITIVITY to share with you all!  In this post, Kpopalypse is going to cheer you up by letting you know all the POSITIVE things about Le Sserafim’s Kim Garam!

Reason that Kpopalypse feels POSITIVE about Kim Garam #1 – Source Music now has a six member girl group again

So if you’re an actual normal person, and not one of the knuckle-scraping denizens of k-pop online communities renting out 99% of their mental energy to mega-corporations in exchange for a brief glimpse at some stranger’s upturned ankle like cryptominers destroying the earth for two cents a day, “who the fuck is Kim Garam?” would be a reasonable question to ask at this point.  Well as it happens, she is one of the new members of yet-to-be-debuted girl group Le Sserafim who will be coming out on HYBE-owned Source Music shortly.  Last time Source Music had a six member girl group it was called Gfriend, and as everyone sensible who follows the k-pops knows, Gfriend were one of the groups with the best song quality in all of k-pop, so the chances of Le Sserafim also not sucking are at least reasonable.  Now that Gfriend has collapsed and we have Gfriend spinoff group Viviz carrying on the Gfriend tradition of generally not being shit, I am now less heartbroken over their demise and ready to calmly accept Le Sserafim.

Reason that Kpopalypse feels POSITIVE about Kim Garam #2 – fantastic taste in chalkboard art

Take a look at the above image, this is a screen capture from Cravity’s music video for the song “Adrenaline“, released only a few weeks before this post, where the boys in Cravity are cosplaying a bunch of high school kids writing stuff on the blackboard, which isn’t weird or creepy at all.  What you will notice is that the chalkboard looks like no chalkboard in any high school ever.  Slogans like “FUN!”, “Yeah”, “Party!”, “Makes you happy” etc are not the kind of things that kids write, or at least, certainly not in my school.  I even commented in my roundup for this video: “As if high school kids write stuff like “Fun!” and “Love” on chalkboards instead of hairy balls and cocks smeared in vomit pissing on shit-filled vaginas.”  My Super Boram ESP powers clearly came through again as only a couple of weeks later, the following image surfaced on Korean social media, from Kim Garam’s actual high school:

Here is the image in question, with Kim Garam circled in LGBT-friendly rainbow colours.  Maybe it isn’t her, who knows with her hands across her face like that, but some random Korean person online said this is her and nobody denied it so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.  Now I don’t know if Kim Garam herself did the drawings or if someone else did, but either way she’s either an excellent artist, or has excellent taste in art.  These drawings made me nostalgic for my own high school days (which is no easy feat given how horrible my high school was and how much I’ve been trying to forget that I ever even went there) and I can only hope that she is assigned to coordinate the box art for the physical release of Le Sserafim’s actual debut.

Reason that Kpopalypse feels POSITIVE about Kim Garam #3 – she helped IVE improve their game

Here’s another recent “chalkboard leak”, because that’s where all the most relevant information in the k-pop world happens now, apparently:

Apparently this chalkboard text reads, in part, “LE SSERAFIM will beat IVE – IVE down, LE SSERAFIM up!”  Now IVE have actually been pretty musically dogshit ever since release, but that actually changed very recently with the release of “Love Dive”, which is an excellent song and the first tune from IVE that doesn’t suck flat-out.

Clearly Kim Garam’s friendly chalkboard prodding has given IVE’s producers the exact motivation they needed to finally produce a good song.  Maybe she can even save her labelmates BTS from eternal mediocrity by using her artistic skills and doing a chalkboard drawing of someone who fell in a coma from listening to the last half a dozen boring as batshit BTS comebacks back-to-back getting penetrated by a penis with “LE SSERAFIM up” written on the side.  We can dream.

Reason that Kpopalypse feels POSITIVE about Kim Garam #4 – BTS now have some female companionship

Now that Gfriend are no longer on HYBE subsidiary Source Music, I’m sure that the boys of HYBE’s flagship group BTS have been lonelier than ever.  It’s no secret to any BTS fan who has been paying any attention at all to the mental state of the members, that the boys of BTS have been burning out even harder than most k-pop writers.  Of course those men of BTS would certainly feel the need for the female companionship that I’m sure their schedule has been strictly denying them up until this point, but they can’t just date easily given the imperative of not getting hooked up with crazy fangirls.   What better than a new group of potential Gfriends-with-benefits right under their noses?  Kim Garam has allegedly said that she would fuck Taehyung (V) from BTS, and she might be jumping the gun a bit there given that she’s a bit too young to be doing that sort of thing with some aging pop idol that she doesn’t really know, but he seems like a nice guy who would tell her to relax and wait patiently until she could return with a more mature image so perhaps she will get her wish and there will be a new power couple in k-pop’s future.  I’m sure that BTS’s adoring fanbase will only wish happiness for them both.

Reason that Kpopalypse feels POSITIVE about Kim Garam #5 – she seems like a good friend to have around

Here’s a list of some of the things that Kim Garam has allegedly done in high school, courtesy of Asian Junkie who helpfully went to all the trouble of compiling this stuff:

• Bashed someone in the face with a brick (or bashed them into some bricks, whatever)
• Split someone else’s head open with a flowerpot, apparently this was part of a ‘gang violence’ incident, a nice aegyo touch to use flowers and not a brick, is the gang called “the pansies” and they cruise around school doing flower arrangements or what
• Drunk a lot, as you do in high school, or anywhere else in Korea for that matter
• Smoked a lot, as you do in high school, one more thing she has in common with Taehyung from BTS – hey they could share cigarettes how romantic uwu
• Swore and told sexual jokes a lot, as you do in high school, or on kpopalypse.com for that matter
• Was generally obsessed with sex, as one often is in high school, or on kpopalypse.com for that matter
• Threatened classmates who didn’t pick up her calls, which is totally justified if you have caller ID on, why aren’t you picking up?  You already know who it is, just pick up the phone you stupid cunt, don’t make me come and get you

I’m sorry but this just sounds like the kind of person who I wished I had on my side in high school.  Half of this shit is just stuff that I would do, and the other half is certainly stuff that I’d be happy for others to do on my behalf.  Plus who’s to say that the victims didn’t do something shitty to deserve it.  Imagine if you were getting bullied in school lunchtime with someone picking on you mercilessly and a whole bunch of other people crowding around watching (as they always do, instead of, you know, trying to stop it) and then out of nowhere a random flowerpot comes flying through the air and hits your bully in the face so hard that it cracks their skull open, they immediately collapse on the ground and start moaning in agony.  The teacher on yard patrol hears the noise, comes up and starts screaming at everyone “what happened?  Who did that?”  “Wasn’t me, miss” mumbles everyone present while the teacher dials the ambulance.  You turn around and there’s Kim Garam clandestinely rubbing her slightly potting-mix-stained fingers off on her school skirt and giving you a sly wink.  If I was transported back to high school I would befriend Kim Garam immediately, she seems like the kind of girl who could handle some business and get things done.  If nothing else, she certainly knows that the fucking dick goes in the pussy.

Reason that Kpopalypse feels POSITIVE about Kim Garam #6 – she’s responsible for inspiring some of Asian Junkie’s best writing in ages

As I mentioned before, Asian Junkie went to the trouble of compiling all the Garam “bullying” data into one post and I really, genuinely have to thank him for doing this as it saved me having to trawl through about 20 different posts to try and salvage some kind of context out of everything.  It’s not a secret that Asian Junkie has been burning out harder than a BTS member, he admits freely that he’s been optimising his site for pure laziness so he can write more about people getting molested by sportballs, so I thought the era of helpful Asian Junkie controversy recap articles might be over.  Obviously I was wrong and he’s done a great job here so make sure you go over to his site and thank him by improving the quality of the comments section on all his articles with some actually funny stuff and maybe some quality thirst comments instead of the usual “gosh I’m so horrified by x” and “gosh the people involved in this situation really need to do y” kind of thing that his community seems to be all about these days. 

Reason that Kpopalypse feels POSITIVE about Kim Garam #7 – she would be a great Kpopalypse interview candidate

Probably the only claim about Kim Garam that is actually interesting to normal people with a brain is that she allegedly ‘leaked internal documents’ from another agency.  If this is actually true, where did she leak them?  If they’re leaked, wouldn’t they be in public circulation by now, or at least on k-pop Wikileaks or something?  The fact that this claim exists but no actual documents have come to light suggests that this might be total bullshit, which of course makes the other allegations look like total bullshit too.  Remember how Lovelyz’ Seo Jisoo was accused of about 50 different really extreme things all at once and in the end it was all crap?  Be suspicious of people casting anybody as a “pure villain” – or an “angel” for that matter, life is always more complex than that.  However if the “leak” is real, can Kpopalypse see them?  Is it an actual document or just another “chalkboard leak”?  Kim Garam, why don’t you get in touch with Kpopalypse so we can have a chat about what’s in those documents and maybe publish some of those.  I’m up for it if you are.  Bring your flowerpot, just in case.

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That’s all for this POSITIVE post – I hope you’re now feeling the POSITIVE vibes!  Kpopalypse will return with more POSITIVITY in the future!