From Cringe to Cultural Currency: The Unlikely Journey of Fandoms Nobody Used to Admit They Had

Somewhere around 2012, admitting you were into anime in most American high schools was roughly equivalent to announcing you collected medieval weaponry. Technically interesting, personally risky. You had your people — found online, mostly — and everyone else had their opinions.

Fast forward to 2024. Demon Slayer is breaking box office records. BTS has performed at the Grammys. The Last of Us won more Emmys than prestige dramas that cost twice as much to make. The stuff that used to be whispered about in Discord servers is now on billboards in Times Square.

So what exactly happened?

The Underground Pipeline

Every fandom that eventually goes mainstream follows a recognizable path, even if the timeline varies. It starts in the margins — forums, subreddits, early Twitter accounts, Discord servers — where a small but intensely passionate community develops its own language, rituals, and shared references. This underground phase is actually crucial. It's where the culture gets dense and rich enough to be interesting to outsiders.

Anime is the clearest case study. For decades, it existed in American pop culture as a punchline or a curiosity — something kids watched on Cartoon Network in the early 2000s but mostly grew out of. The community that didn't grow out of it kept building, kept translating, kept creating fan art and fanfiction and elaborate theory threads that nobody outside the community was reading.

Then Crunchyroll got a real interface. Then Netflix started licensing titles aggressively. Then TikTok's algorithm discovered that anime edits got enormous engagement. Suddenly, a fandom that had been quietly accumulating depth for 30 years was visible to everyone at once.

"What looks like an overnight explosion is almost never that," says cultural commentator and podcast host Deja Williams, who covers fandom and internet culture. "There's always a long underground period where the community is doing the actual work. The algorithm just turns on the lights."

TikTok as the Great Equalizer (and Accelerant)

If there's a single technology that has most dramatically collapsed the distance between niche and mainstream in the last five years, it's TikTok. The platform's recommendation engine doesn't care about your existing social graph — it cares about engagement. And niche communities, it turns out, are extraordinarily good at generating engagement because they're enthusiastic, fluent, and constantly producing content.

A single well-edited K-pop performance clip can land on the For You Page of someone who has never knowingly listened to a Korean pop song in their life. If that person watches it twice, the algorithm notes it. If they watch three more, they're now part of the K-pop pipeline whether they intended to be or not.

This is how millions of Americans discovered BTS, BLACKPINK, and the broader K-pop ecosystem — not through radio play or traditional music industry marketing, but through short-form video that made the fandom's energy visible and contagious. The ARMY (BTS's notoriously organized fanbase) didn't just grow; it recruited, systematically and joyfully, using every tool the platform offered.

The Generational Shift in What Counts as Embarrassing

There's also something deeper happening here that goes beyond algorithms. Gen Z — and increasingly younger millennials — simply have a different relationship with the concept of "cringe."

For older generations, social identity was heavily policed around mainstream acceptability. Liking the wrong thing, the wrong band, the wrong genre of anything carried genuine social risk. Fitting in required curating your tastes to match what was broadly legible and respected.

Gen Z grew up with the internet as a primary social environment, which means they grew up understanding that every taste, no matter how obscure, has a community somewhere. The internet didn't just make it safer to be weird — it reframed weirdness as a form of authenticity. Having a deep, specific, intense interest in something became a personality asset rather than a liability.

This is why you'll see college students with Gundam figures on their desk right next to their Stanley Cup, or why gaming references appear in mainstream advertising without a trace of irony. The cultural gatekeeping that kept these interests "embarrassing" for so long has largely collapsed.

What Happens When the Mainstream Arrives

Here's the part the original fans have complicated feelings about: when your private passion becomes a TikTok trend, things get weird.

On one hand, mainstream attention brings resources — better merchandise, bigger events, more content, wider representation. K-pop fans who spent years watching their favorite groups play tiny venues are now watching them sell out SoFi Stadium. That's objectively cool.

On the other hand, the intimacy changes. The inside jokes become outside jokes. The dense cultural fluency that made the fandom feel like a secret society gets diluted by waves of casual fans who are here for the aesthetic but not the lore. Veteran community members sometimes describe this as a kind of grief — watching something precious become a product.

"There's always tension between visibility and authenticity," says Williams. "The fans who built the community from nothing often feel like they're watching their hometown get gentrified."

Gaming communities have navigated this particularly visibly. The mainstreaming of esports and gaming culture has brought enormous legitimacy and money to a space that spent decades being dismissed. It's also produced endless arguments about who counts as a "real" gamer, gatekeeping that mirrors almost exactly the gatekeeping those same communities once faced from the outside.

The Cycle Keeps Turning

The interesting thing about watching all of this play out is that the cycle never really stops. While anime and K-pop are now firmly in the mainstream conversation, other communities are in their underground phase right now — building density, developing culture, waiting for the algorithm to turn on the lights.

Whatever it is you're currently embarrassed to admit you're into? Give it five years.

The stuff on the fringe today has a habit of becoming tomorrow's Billboard chart, Emmy nominee, or Netflix Original. The only thing that's actually changed is how quickly the pipeline moves — and how many people are watching when it does.