u/jungkoks

Preferably sections M, L, or K because I have no tickets with view of that side of the stage.

(Not interested in non-VIP tickets)

(No explicit numbers, but relative height measurements)

I had a restrictive ed mainly from 2016-2018, but recovered mostly. Most things don't trigger me much anymore and disordered thoughts are not that difficult to ignore nowadays. Occasionally, I would have mini-relapses, but they usually only last a few days and leave no long-lasting impact. Since the recent cultural shift towards thinness again, my disordered thoughts have been more frequent and a bit harder to work past.

I have an online friend who is currently and self-admittedly developing an eating disorder. It started because a depressive episode caused her to lose a lot of weight, and she liked the results. Now she restricts intentionally with the goal of being underweight.

For context, I am thin even when eating a non-restrictive diet. I am also less than an inch taller than her.

She recently texted me:

"Tbh I was just going to do *my weight* but I'm looking at girls *around our height* and *my weight* and idk i wanna look thinner than that."

I tried playing it off by saying that I'm like an inch taller so it's cool. I'm not someone who wears their heart on their sleeve (and I didn't initially realize that this conversation would stick with me even a week later), but that didn't really stop her so she specified the specific decimal point to her height which makes us only a half and inch different in reality.

Ever since, I stopped messaging her back. I'm just considering not even mentioning it again to her and jusy unfollowing because she's actively engaging in her disorder and having her understand that I don'y want to be part of her competitive ed is like talking to a brick wall probably. This isn't her first time mentioning her ED to me either, but it just felt the most tone deaf.

Is this her being competitive? Am I making it too personal and misreading because of my own disordered thinking?

I personally have ticketed for Korean, North American, and Indonesian BTS shows and I feel like in all cases (to varying degrees ofc, since some regions are more anti-fan resale than others) that ticketing has just become a shitshow. I doubt BigHit will ever make army membership sign-ups time sensitive again (that would limit profit), so scalpers literally can just buy as many memberships as they want, buy the best tickets, and resell to desperate fans through unofficial means for profit. In Asia, it's especially bad because they'll sell/rent out army membership codes.. not even tickets. Just the membership itself.

The ideal best protection against this would be bringing back time-sensitive army membership sign-ups, or at least giving priority to gold membership holders, but that's probably not ever going to happen. Reintroducing the raffle is probably the only way to save the state of Korean ticketing now. In North America, botting is pretty much restricted only to a few bad apples here or there (relative to Asia at least), but in Korea/SEA, botting is normal and even normal fans will hire people with bot/macro programs to try and secure a ticket.

I know the Busan shows sparked discourse about how lame Korean crowds are, but I have to side with Korean fans when they talk about how the floor is filled with lots of people (and a lot of those people not even being Korean) more concerned with their fancams. I was actually a little surprised to see how little of the audience at Jin's Goyang shows were Korean. It's a significant chunk of the crowd. Some K-armys obviously went too far about their complaints (the ones who said they get upset when they sit next to foreigners at shows, xenophobic stuff like that), but the majority who are simply just upset about being wrongfully blamed aren't actually wrong.. I saw some of them suggesting that foreigners be de-prioritized, but they're assuming genuine foreign fans are being prioritize anyway. They're not. Global NOL/Interpark sucks. Even camping for cancellation tickets is nearly impossible for foreigners. Foreign scalpers have access to Korean NOL accounts too, so further shitting on foreign fans helps nobody but scalpers.

For North American shows, the scalping problem actually isn't as bad as Asian shows in my opinion. In no way do I mean to compliment Ticketmaster or Seatgeek or whatever, they suck (predatory monopolies are bad), but it could be sooo much worse.. ahah 💔. I don't like, however, that BigHit did not allow official fan resale for the arirang tour because it serves as harm reduction in my opinion (TM confirmed that the label/artist's end gets to choose whether or not to do resale). I have never seen so many armys get scammed before this tour. Resellers will always find a way.. so at least give the fans a safe and controlled marketplace to exchange tickets. They could even cap the resale prices, but whatever. I've also seen that a lot of armys are having a hard time selling their tickets at a 50%+ loss even.. so I think having a place to gather official fan resale tickets would probably prevent regular fans from losing hundreds and make more apprehensive fans less scared to buy fan-to-fan. I did think the ticket redistribution thing was neat though, I was able to get my day 2&4 vegas tickets through the scalper cancellations and reraffle.

When I ticketed for the added Jakarta date, I saw on twitter that Chinese/Hong Kong IP addresses were blocked to try and prevent scalping unlike the initial sale (in which vip sold out in like 5 or less minutes, and all tickets were basically gone within 40 minutes). Not sure how effective that was (probably a little? A lot of scalpers are in those areas, but they also are probably clever enough to find a new loophole to bypass the IP block) but it probably sucked if you were just an honest HK/Chinese fan trying to get tickets, especially since HK tickets were basically all bought by scalpers.

Comparing this to the Japanese ticket sale, it's like day and night. Outside of the global fanclub raffle, the Japanese raffle method almost ensures that mostly only actual armys who are Japanese residents get tickets. There isn't an issue with people buying tickets for their fancams, since filming is strictly prohibited (with the new exception of soundcheck). Whenever people bring up implementing the Japanese raffle system, people bring up that J-Army hate it (idk if that's actually how they feel though), so that raises a question. Would you rather,

1). Enter a decently fair raffle to see bts but not be able to choose where you sit and potentially get nothing at all with 0 recourse (just SOL).... but at least it was mostly fans who got the tickets. (Japan)

2). Ticket normally with scalpers in the mix. If you fail during initial sale, you could have a chance still and find face value tickets if you decide to risk fan-to-fan resale. Face value is horribly priced anyway (especially for Mexico and Canada, jeez) so, hey, might as well. (North America)

3). Have a lot be determined by if you're using a botting program/proxy buyer or not (unless you're lucky or want to sit in the wayyyy high stands), having to jump through 728283 hoops to get overpriced resale from exclusively scalpers. Might get your ticket cancelled or denied entry anyway. (Non-Japan majority of Asian dates)

4). Has some form of impactful anti-scalping laws but scalping still persists lol (EU & Australia). Not too familar though, I haven't ticketed for either of these regions.

5). Secret fifth thing (South America + future ME dates...if any of you have ticketed for those regions, i'd be interested to hear about it!!).