hhhhhng so... i'll try to keep it short n' sweet but basically, i watched the first ep of the survival when it came out because i wanted to see itzy debut, got disappointed because itzy clearly wouldn't debut and followed the survival's updates from a distance, from then on i always sorta kept them on my radar music-wise! my pace was on my spotify wrapped, i was voting for miroh bc some oomfies at the time asked for help, i was a big fan (understatement of the century) of levanter when it came out, looooooved in life so much i almost became a stay then, but THEN! i distanced myself altogether from kpop shortly after that!
fast forward to 2024, my partner got into skz and i was like AH YES!!! I REMEMBER THEM! I HAVEN'T HEARD THAT NAME IN YEARS... i felt like that scene from ratatouille where the critic eats ... the ratatouille, so i started listening to their music again and caught up with everything that came out between 2021 to 2024, tho i refused to "be a stay" because i had never gone past just listening to the music in all the years since debut and i was reluctant to do it now (just because i didn't want to become a kpop stan again... lmao look how that worked out for me), but my partner was and is a huuuuuge stay and they gave me no choice lmao, for an entire year i basically was up to date with EVERYTHING going on, we even went on vacation in japan and we would stop at a restaurant and i'd get updates in between bites.
what eventually did it was going to the concert this summer and looking more excited and hyped up than my partner lmao i had to officially declare defeat then...
that and the fact that i was obsessed with changbin lmao all my partner had to do to get me to listen to the updates was lure me in with the promise of changbin... and then even lino... so i guess that, technically speaking, the biases came before i officially declared myself a stay?