The Rise of Pop Culture Zines and DIY Communities: There is something very serious about being a fan in 2026. You can know the release date of an album before your best friend; you can recognise an idol from a blurry pap photograph; have a seventeen-slide carousel explaining why an MV or a series is actually about grief, or capitalism or the moon; and even spend hours translating a Japanese interview or learn the language itself. Then, at some point, you might decide that this is not just enough and you need a zine about it
The Rise of Pop Culture Zines and DIY Communities
Zines are basically small, self-published booklets or magazines, non-commercial in nature, that are made by individuals or a group. Perhaps it starts as eight photocopied pages held together; a favourite artist doodled into the margin; an album review next to a short poem; a collage that makes no sense until it makes perfect sense to the person who made it and reads it; a badly scanned photograph and some questionable typography, perhaps… and somewhere in the middle a paragraph that begins with “I know it is insane, but hear me out”.
Somehow, somewhere between all of that, fandom stops being something you consume and becomes something you publish.
That shift is particularly interesting in India, where the consumption of international pop culture has become increasingly participatory in nature. Alongside the wave of Korean fandom, including K-pop and K-drama, anime, J-pop, C-pop and other internet-born subcultures have created communities in which discovering something is only the beginning.
Fans translate, archive, edit, draw, write, organise, collect and meet: the internet gave us access to the world.
From Watching to Belonging
The Indian K-pop story did not begin with BTS becoming a global phenomenon. The Korean Cultural Centre India has traced the country’s early Hallyu fandom to the Northeast, where Korean films and television had already found audiences in the early and mid-2000s. By 2008, Nagaland hosted the India-Korea music festival.
By 2018, the scale was becoming massive: the India round of Changwon K-pop World Festival had reportedly grown to 523 teams registering across India.
Then came the pandemic. Streaming platforms made international entertainment even more accessible, social media made fandoms easily organisable, and fandoms became increasingly visible online and offline.
Korean Cultural Centre India writes, “In 2020, 814 students registered with them for 23 classes, whereas in 2021, 4,680 students registered for 37 classes. Their students usually consist of 70% university students and 30% adult workers, where on an average, 90% of the students are female, and only 10% are male. Since they also provide teachers, curriculum and textbooks for Indian schools, their teachers taught in 13 schools in 2020 to 434 students, whereas in 2021, they taught 1,536 students in 26 schools.”
Numbers are only one part of the story; the more interesting thing about fandom is what people do once they find one another because there is a difference between being an audience and being a community.
The Internet Made Fandom A Big Deal!
This is where the resurgence of zines becomes interesting. Zines were always associated with DIY publishing: small-scale, self-produced; can be artistic, personal, musical, dramatic, absurd or everything at once, and you do not need a publishing house to make one.
All you need is paper, a printer, scissors, a stapler, and an alarming amount of time to make one. The zine is, however, not necessarily the point: the people are; the college festival is; a stranger picking up a tiny booklet and saying, “wait, you like it too?” is; finding like-minded people is.
Fandom Was Always DIY; We Just Get Better WiFi Now
The modern internet can sometimes make fandom look like an endless stream of consumption: streaming numbers, album drops, fancams, edits, reactions, videos, merchandise, but fandom has always had a DIY instinct.
Someone translates lyrics because they love it; sometimes they create a fan account because they want people to find the same artist; someone archives interviews; makes fanfiction; designs posters; someone learns enough of a new language to understand an interview, an MV and sometimes even a show without subtitles.
The machinery might change, but the impulse remains, and this is where pop-culture and global fandoms start intersecting with the independent publishing culture: not because every fan is suddenly making a zine and not because zines exist only because of fandom; rather, both are expressions of wanting to participate in a fan culture.
The tiny magazine as a love letter: There is also something beautifully old-fashioned about making physical media for something that exists largely online: your favourite artist can be on your phone, your laptop, television, earphones simultaneously, and yet you print them, cut them out, stick them onto paper, write in your own handwriting; or, in a digitised version your customise it according to your own unique aesthetic flavours. You make something that cannot autoplay!
Fandom Is Not Embarrassing; It Is Just Unfinished, Perhaps
There is still something that feels embarrassing a lot of times in admitting that you care too much about something particularly related to entertainment: about knowing every lyric; crying over your favourite fictional character; learning a language because of a pop star; collecting photocards; writing four pages on an album nobody in your family knows about… but perhaps the strange little revolution happening inside a fandom community is that people are becoming less interested in hiding the intensity and are turning it into art.
It is being turned into writing, design, events, friendships, archives, tiny little publications that fit inside a pocket. The world is full of people making things because they care about something, and perhaps that is exactly how culture has always been made. Not by everyone agreeing that something is important, but by one person caring enough to make another person look.
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