BTS Is Back. Who Am I, If Not Obsessed?

I am 12, nearing 13. In the morning, before school, I fashion four sheets of green felt into a tunic that I belt together with rope. When the bus comes, I ascend its steps wearing my tunic and carrying a thin tree branch on which I attach some yarn. This is what I call my bow.

My name is Jenny Tinúviel Greenleaf. I am an elf and the wife of Legolas Greenleaf.

Yes, that Legolas. The yellow-haired, gray-eyed elf prince from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the resulting film trilogy, where he is portrayed by the gorgeous British actor Orlando Bloom, who I happen to know prefers to be called “Orli.” To play the part, I learn the Elven script known as Tengwar. Tolkien’s elves can walk atop snow, so I reason that I must walk on my tiptoes to simulate that same lightness. (As a result, my calves grow.) Using a green ink pen, I carve his name all over my body. He has been alive for 2,931 years and so have I. For my seventh-grade class project, I create an encyclopedic website called Fellowship of Nine, for which I learn HTML and spend my evenings tinkering with frames.

Of course, I write fanfiction. Some of it I am misguided enough to turn in for class, and my teacher, who also likes Lord of the Rings, humors me by giving me an A. My most salacious creation—and one I do not share with anyone—is a story about bathing naked under a waterfall when Legolas finds me. I never pen the steamiest parts, and thank Eru Ilúvatar that I don’t, because my mother eventually finds it. By the time I enter high school, I have acquired a black T-shirt and purse both emblazoned with “I <3 Orlando.” My reputation is that of the “LOTR Freak.”

“You’re the girl that’s obsessed with Legolas,” a girl tells me in the cafeteria. I don’t even know her, but this is how she—and everyone—seems to know me.

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The earliest known use of the word “obsession” occurred in the mid-1500s. “Obsession” borrows partly from French (l’obsession) and partly from Latin (obsessionem), both describing the act of besieging. The meaning changed slightly in the 1600s, describing the “hostile action of an evil spirit.” By the 1670s, it was the “action of anything which engrosses the mind.” And in 1901, “obsession” came to mean an “idea or image that intrudes on the mind of a person against his will.” This is perhaps closest to our modern definition: “a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling.” Across all the definitions, there seems to be a common theme, an undercurrent that the person has lost control of their obsession; the act of obsessing is not something one does, but that is done to them. That is, the object of the obsession has a mind and spirit of its own.

Legolas was not my first obsession. When I was 9, I fell in love with Disney’s Tarzan. I taught myself to walk on my thumbs and middle knuckles, the way the character does in the movie, wandering the floors like a true gorilla. Inspired by the way Tarzan surfs and skates along tree branches, I climbed the big magnolia in front of our apartment complex in Oxford, Mississippi, wearing rollerblades, hoping that I could move the way he did. (I nearly died.) At 13, my obsession turned to Les Misérables. During class, when asked to memorize and recite our favorite poems, I subjected my classmates to a performance of the song “Red and Black,” which has at least seven narrators—I played them all. When I went to China that summer to visit my family, I took the nearly 1,500-page book by Victor Hugo with me and used it as a pillow on the plane. In college, I became so obsessed with season 8 American Idol contestant Adam Lambert that I pleaded with my friend to vote for me while I was out of the country.

For a long time, when filling out personality questionnaires for fun, I would describe myself as having an “obsessive personality.” And for most of my life, I celebrated this aspect of myself: It meant that I cared. My obsessions burned as hot and bright as a meteor, flashing through my life and filling it with purpose. When I was obsessed, I—and everything around me—had meaning.

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In 2019, I was in the final semester of my MFA program in Wyoming when I happened upon a video of the Korean boyband BTS performing their song “Boy With Luv” on Saturday Night Live. I fell instantly, joyously. That day (and for many days after), I shirked my duties, doing the bare minimum for class so that I could spend my time learning about BTS, watching all the videos of them I could find on the internet.

Two weeks later, I was at the Denver Airport, waiting for a flight to Chicago, where BTS would be performing as part of their Love Yourself World Tour. The concert ticket was $300, which was nearly impossible for me to afford as a graduate student, and I had to miss my MFA graduation celebration to travel to Illinois. The department head called me while I was at the airport and Facetimed me into the festivities. I didn’t know how to explain to them what was happening to me—that this feeling was more important.

BTS performing in 2019.

I attended the concert alone. It was April and windy. I walked through downtown Chicago to Soldier Field, stopping at a few bars beforehand, because I was full of nerves. My seat was between a woman in her 40s who had driven in from Houston and two sisters from Ohio. During the concert, it rained and I cocooned myself in my raincoat, just me and the seven members of BTS—strangers to me only two weeks prior, now as close as the breath puffering from my cold body.

A few things I did, during the height of my fandom in 2019 and 2020: wake up at 4 A.M. to watch livestreams of BTS concerts taking place in Korea. Buy weeks’ worth of exclusive video content and behind-the-scenes footage. Buy a DVD player so that I could watch the content the band released commemorating each year, which they called Memories. Spend a summer playing a card-collecting game on my phone called BTS World, now defunct. Buy multiple stuffed plushies and other merchandise related to BT21, their official mascots.

I read the above and think, as you must be thinking now: You dummy! Irresponsible with your money! Foolish to fall victim to a machine that profits from the passion and naivete of fans! Does it change your opinion of me if I tell you: I was content? Will you let me off easy if I say: Every time I have been obsessed with something, a fan of something, I was a child fed, a happy house? The squealing, the secret language, the daily injection of dopamine. I loved it all.

“Does it change your opinion of me if I tell you: I was content?”

Last summer, at a writer’s conference, I sat in on a craft lecture by the poets Nate Marshall and Cortney Lamar Charleston. The lecture was about how their mutual obsession of the WWE could be applied to understanding poetry, and how the two mediums utilized similar craft techniques, thus speaking to each other. A video clip of Irish wrestler Becky Lynch’s promo “Held Down by the Man” was placed next to Sharon Olds’ poem “The Language of the Brag.” Both, a loud cry of sheer bravado. I walked away from the lecture in awe—not just of the poetry and the glimpse into the pageantry of the WWE, but of the fact that Marshall and Charleston had turned their obsessions into art and a way of understanding art. As they saw it, we should consider ways in which we can turn what might be considered “lowbrow” by some (i.e. the WWE) into that which might be considered “highbrow” by others (poetry, literature).

Another thing I did, at the height of my fandom and obsession: write a novel about it.

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In the past decade, fandom and obsession have evolved at breakneck speed, transforming from something done largely in private—either alone, or via semi-anonymous message boards, Tumblr pages, and fanfiction sites—to a remarkably public and communal experience. In 2013, a New York Times article noted the explosion of the phrase, “I’m obsessed,” tracing its rise to as early as 2008. In 2017, the term “stan” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Last November, the Cambridge Dictionary named “parasocial” its word of the year.

Fast forward to 2026, when the act of being “obsessed” with something is, in fact, the norm. A scroll through Instagram, for example, is rife with comments professing how “obsessed” someone is with any given piece of content, whether it’s a picture of a friend’s dog, a screengrab from the TV show du jour, or a video of a normal person doing mundane, everyday things. As well, obsessing is now an offline event, whether it’s a watch party at a bar or a lookalike competition in the park. Today, our cultural understanding is that to be in this world is also to stan in it. The Jenny of 2002 who was considered weird for loving Legolas too much would be shocked to see how loudly and openly we speak of our obsessions now. She would want to be here for it. Luckily, she is.

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A few years ago, a BTS fan account on Instagram stopped updating regularly. Eventually, when the user returned, they explained that they had started taking a mood stabilizer and weren’t obsessed with BTS anymore. The post has since become a reference point for those poking fun at the obsessive nature of BTS fans, or any fandom for that matter: Your obsessiveness must be a sign of an underlying personal issue. It’s a harsh assessment, but I don’t think it’s entirely off the mark for me, at least; when I think about the obsessions scattered throughout my life, they have all appeared when I needed them most, even without knowing why at the time.

When I first encountered Lord of the Rings, I was nursing several broken friendships and finding my place in the new hell of middle school. In college, I spent a year in a Livejournal community dedicated to Adam Lambert, forging friendships in comments sections that surpassed 5,000 messages daily because I struggled to make friends “IRL.” In my MFA program, I was drawn to BTS because I admired the closeness and comfort the members exhibited with one another—an intimacy I craved as I prepared to graduate and return to a city that no longer felt like home.