History of Velo City's Korean Culture Exchange

Velo City has had a number of run-ins with K-culture, as given light by the fact that they are First-Generation Ambassadors for WEBTOON, and the exclusive focus of their Patreon (and sometimes their Velo City Extras channel) on K-Pop.

### Getting Velo City to Stay

The brothers went through the rabbit hole thanks to Stays (the collective Stray Kids fandom) and Tower of God by watching edited meme videos and guide videos that helped the boys discover more from the group. They also started to react to their music videos in release order, their survival show, and individual guide videos of the members (which they got spoiled about the survival show in the Bang Chan guide video).

Velo City hosted a Stray Kids Week at the start of August 2020, and they organized a poll of most recommended and highly popular edited meme videos, in which the top 5 would be watched in that week.

As Stray Kids' comeback was in September, the teaser releases overlapped with some of the pre-planned stuff of the boys' schedule, turning into a meme in the Discord community that whenever they plan a schedule, Stray Kids are always there to ruin it. This trend still stands up to this day.

The boys hosted their first reaction/listening party livestream due to the release of Stray Kids' IN LIFE album while there were a lot of new and controversial rules that some people of the K-Pop community implements and enforces, such as ones regarding the use of third-party lyric videos, which made the boys hesitant and conflicted towards the way they should host this party livestream without disrespecting the community. In response to this, the people in the Discord community tried to help compile lyric videos into a playlist that is accurate in translation and follows those controversial rulings.

The livestream was successful. However, a lot of the comments were insistent that Velo City should not react to those lyrics videos, which made both YouTube and Discord Mods at the time stressed as they have to manage those comments and reassure them that those lyrics videos are okay.

After that stressful ordeal, the boys started to host listening parties for Stray Kids albums in release order, as well as a listening party dedicated to the pre-debut group 3RACHA.

One can point to the origin of the clownsif emote as Aasif penning and standing by a K-Pop theory revolving around the supposed underlying lore behind every single Stray Kids album releases.

### Methodology of K-Pop Rabbit Hole Spelunking and Copyright Restrictions

Velo City used to do a poll with a bunch of K-Pop acts, and the act that wins gets a dedicated reaction to one of their songs. This method allows them to discover new groups, but with the only caveat being that they will only react to the act once. As a result, Velo City made a special request role on Discord that would allow Velodachis on Patreon to periodically request any song of any act.

As the boys are caught up with Stray Kids releases due to the listening party streams, they started hosting K-Pop streams that allows viewers to donate and recommend songs. Due to this new development of requesting songs, the request role had some changes where they’re allowed to only request 1 song for each monthly stream.

Due to the risk of copyright strikes from some songs, the boys opened a new channel specific to K-Pop (Velo City Extras) to not lose their main channel. However, conflicting schedules with the VTuber Reaction streams led to K-Pop request streams not happening that often, and was eventually canceled and relegated to be a Patreon exclusive. The last free and public K-Pop request stream was hosted in Discord as a farewell to the video and stream format.

### Discord Ecology

The Velo City Central Discord only had one dedicated channel for K-Pop back then, so it used to be the most active channel in the server due to the general chats, sharing links, and Stray Kids related chats. Because the environment within the channel was changing into a more generalized place, the original K-Pop channel became the new general Discord channel.

The new K-Pop category, in turn, became a full-on K-Culture hub for Velodachis who dwell on the Korean sphere. Channels such as the K-Pop General Channel, K-Pop Media Share Channel, K-Pop Stream and Video Suggestion Channel (which got eventually merged back into the K-Pop General Channel at some point), the K-Pop Media Channel and K-Drama Channel became a new standard place of gathering for said Velodachis.

Unfortunately, due to the circumstances of the Pandemic, and its subsequent effect on the people globally, the K-Pop Velodachi community is in somewhat of a limbo.