I first heard of K-pop in 2007 when a lot of the Asian girls on this forum I went on were talking about Super Junior, Shinee, and Girls' Generation. My first impression was that it was kind of neat that Asians had their own genre of music... but I still wasn't interested bc busy listening to other genres, like pop and alternative.
It wasn't until ten years later when I finally showed interest. I was randomly fooling around on Wiki on September 2, 2017, when I ended up on BTS' page. I was tempted to click out bc we Directioners had some beef with BTS and ARMY fsr and I just went with it lol, but something about that article, I don't remember what, caught my eye and talked me into staying.
Then, on the night of the 16th, I came across somebody's tweet which included a cute pic of Namjoon (I didn't know who he was at the time, just that he was from BTS), and I simply asked who it was in the pic. She was like, "Would you like me to introduce them?" and ofc I accepted bc hey, a new group to fan... and I logged on the next morning to see a whole-ass, completely informative tweet thread about them. But still, I was in denial for the longest time afterwards because I used to only listen to English-sung songs, and it wasn't until mid-2018 that I began to accept my fandom and jump down the rabbit hole.