For most actors, musicians and celebrities, these fan meets happen all over East and Southeast Asia (South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Thailand) and even in Dubai and Australia. For BTS, the fandom may be an extension of their existence. Time and again the band has called on ARMYs for support, whether for their music, or the charities or causes that BTS supports. Any donations made by them are quite often collectively matched by the fans. As J-Hope mentions in the book about BTS’s United Nations invitation, “Because I’m an extremely ordinary person. Just a Gwangju native, with a very ordinary upbringing, so much so that all this took a while for me to accept.” BTS’s relationship with ARMY, formed thanks to the internet, became their unintended path to salvation.” Beyond the Story: 10 Year Record of BTS is a 2023 biography about South Korean pop group BTS. The book is written by Kang Myeong-seok and BTS, and translated into English by Anton Hur in collaboration with Clare Richards and Slin Jung. It was released on July 9, 2023. [1] Chapter three, four and five are called ‘Love, Hate, ARMY’, ‘Inside Out’ and ‘A Flight That Never Lands’, featuring clips from their 2015 breakout 2015 hit ‘I Need U’ and more. BTS shares personal, behind-the-scenes stories of their journey so far through interviews and more than three years of in-depth coverage by Myeongseok Kang, who has written about K-pop and other Korean pop culture in various media. Presented chronologically in seven chapters from before the debut of BTS to the present, their vivid voices and opinions harmonize to tell a sincere, lively, and deep story. In individual interviews that have been conducted without a camera or makeup, they illuminate their musical journey from multiple angles and discuss its significance.

SUGA recalled that their American television debut, in 2017, had been on the same stage for the same awards show (at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles). When the group won artist of the year, he couldn’t help thinking someone had made a mistake — or the world was playing a prank on him. I really appreciated how the focus was put on music and how the author retraced every step they took in the industry by constantly mentioning albums, songs, concepts and eras, while also including their personal struggles, aspirations and dreams in the process. Moreover, the idea of providing links to basically everything they were discussing was so useful and really made the whole book interactive and much more cohesive. I highly suggest you open these links to fully appreciate Bangtan's career and also how much work was put into this book in general. Actually, I don’t think we were people who lived life thinking about so many things. In fact, if we had thought a lot, it would have been harder, and because we were just seven really simple people, maybe that was what made it possible.” Dreams actually come true, that's crazy. I still can't believe it, an actual book written by bangtan themselves along with that Weverse Magazine journalist ahhh we're always eating good in this borahouse god bless! If I wanted to improve somehow, I had to practice my singing, but I didn’t know how to practice,” he said. “So I just kept singing blindly. Every time I made a mistake, I went to the bathroom to cry.”

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The book goes into how the band found what Kang calls “alchemy” because it is a special set of circumstances, people, and hard work that made BTS what it is. Big Hit Entertainment’s director and BTS’s producer Bang Si-hyuk bet everything on a group of trainees to debut as BTS, and everyone else was let go from their contracts. The group discusses what it was like to create music under such immense pressure despite Bang’s faith in the group. I would say that the majority of the events that are discussed in this book are things that fans who have been following their career for a while already know about. Of course we didn’t know their inner thoughts on everything, but there aren’t too many revelations present here. I was hoping for a bit more in terms of learning completely new things about what was going on away from the public eye. Also, at times bits of the story felt kinda sanitized or glossed over.

Now, however, no matter what the world might say, BTS are BTS. They no longer need any other word to describe themselves.”Similarly, other members, before their solo projects, explored what their solo voices would sound like within BTS and the album born out of that was Map of the Soul: 7. Jungkook, the youngest member of the group, explored what it meant “to live in the real world” when he first joined BTS at their trainee dorms. RM/Kim Namjoon became a natural team leader being the oldest trainee (in terms of the time he spent training at Big Hit). The struggles, apart from personal and related to their performance and talent, were also philosophical: do we pursue happiness or give it all up in pursuit of a higher goal? Roberts, Kayleigh (May 8, 2023). "Taylor Swift Fans Have a (Very Compelling) Theory That She's Going to Release a Memoir This Summer". Cosmopolitan . Retrieved May 13, 2023. I do like to try different things. I figured I'd be able to have a variety of experiences if I were an idol and an actor at the same time. Reality had other plans.”

This melange of memories — happy and sad — of seven young boys coming together to change the face of the music industry is one for the BTS fans, .I felt like we’d been outsiders or outliers until then,” RM said. “But now it felt, not like we were in the mainstream necessarily, but we were being welcomed more.” There was a strong sense of being rewarded. That we’d done something together as a group⸺I was overwhelmed by that feeling, I think.” Not that we were doing it for the money necessarily, but I wonder if we should’ve at least been paid enough to buy a meal, and a lot of times we weren’t paid even that.” We really had almost no days off. So, at the time, I wondered whether it was right for a person to live life as exhausted as this.”