First things first, let me introduce AB to those of you who just recently found us or already had enough time to forget where we came from. AB - ARMY Brigade - officially started its journey on Feb. 1st  in 2017 as a small team with a much smaller Twitter account @armybrigade13 of dedicated ARMY who gathered to ameliorate their knowledge about YouTube when with time passing by more and more subjects such as radio promotions got added to our agenda steadily. For a better understanding, I have to admit that AB is not my first fan base I am part of the board of admins. The other base will here be mentioned and further referred to as AC. I and another admin of AB developed and organized many of AC's activities such as a Europe-wide radio request project which even gained recognition in South Korea. Media described it as BTS, with the support of ARMY, is spreading and establishing South Korean pop music culture to western countries. We also started one of the biggest events when it came to getting Dick Clark Production (production company among many others responsible for the Billboard Music Awards) to notice how much they need BTS for their event. No surprise we started to notice a weak seed of pride for ourselves and our work growing inside of us. Nonetheless, something was still missing and the progressing gap of not understanding each other and divergent future visions wasn’t of any help too. Our professional and creative conceptualizations simply wouldn’t go well together. We did part our ways with AC to fulfill our dream of a team - a family - to support each other in happiness and despair. Our team should always be able to openly speak about anything and enjoy their love for BTS. And second, every member should become able to use their full potential in supporting our favorites no matter what the task is (streaming/voting…). Therefore we as AB set the ambitious goal to evolve the most efficient and less time-consuming methods to attain those tasks. We started as a small streaming team in collaboration with an equally small streaming team from South Korea. Our team slowly obtained their experience by performing multiple observations and researches. We made it our duty to share our discoveries and educate ARMY as well as create and provide different events and projects. 

 

AB’s tale of suffering began in the second half of 2019 when Twitter suspended not just @armybrigade13 but also our sub-accounts @AB13_pt2 and @AB13_Stats as well as all of our admins’ private accounts for unjustified reasons. We became one of the many victims of the great Twitter purge. No need to mention we all fell into a deep void of sadness and depression. Thankfully with the constant support from our team members and followers, who stayed by our side even after the suspension and kept cheering us on, we have been able to go on. We thoroughly thought about how our next steps should look like and how to come back and came up with a solution. We wanted to try something completely new and ended up with 10 accounts, all led by AB’s admins - one personal account for every admin. 

 

Admin H - Admin Y - Admin E - Admin M - Admin Snow - Admin D - Admin N - Admin F - 

Admin W - Admin T

 

With the release of Map of the Soul : 7 approaching another main AB account @armybrigade7 came into the world to provide more general information with a more professional touch when our personal accounts tended to become more silly with every passing day. Sadly our joyful days went to an end way too fast when at the end of February almost all our accounts received another suspension by Twitter. With sadness finding its way back into our hearts we also got dragged back into our void of depression. This time it took us months to overcome it. Get our strength and motivation back to start rebuilding AB. Finally, we reorganized ourselves as well as added a few new applications to our base and came back as @armybrigade1306. 

As of today, we are still trying to get our main account back. Only the god and the future know if that will ever happen.

 

Now, with all the time we’ve already worked as a base and all kinds of experiences we’ve made we became aware that posting and saving all our content only on Twitter wasn't as well thought through as we believed it to be. With losing our accounts we also lost our complete content which previously to posting cost us many hours of researching, preparing, designing, writing, basically lots of work. Twitter simply isn’t the best way to provide information. 

 

Thinking about a solution to this annoying situation we found an alternative online storage for our precious thoughts. With our latest comeback, we introduced it to you, our - Forum -. Here you can find anything regarding streaming, voting, and ARMY Brigade. Should there still be unanswered questions simply write a comment or visit our - Discord Server - for a live chat. We are always willing to help no matter how small or big your concern may seem to you. Every ARMY is free to join our forum and, or our Discord, let it be to silently educate oneself, help others, ask us anything, get the newest tutorials or simply chat to fellow ARMY. You can also visit our - Website - and learn about the founding and history of ARMY Brigade. 

 

During our time of activity, we had to overcome a lot of things but what made this all worth our blood, sweat and tears were all the love we've gotten from our Brigadiers and followers, especially during the many events we launched or participated in. In 2017 we had 'Discover BTS' an event to spread BTS content over Twitter and other SNS. It was also the year of BTS’ first BBMA nomination. This voting was completely new to us as it was held on Twitter and we needed to use a specific # in our Tweets to vote instead of collecting tickets in a certain app and use them for the voting. Therefore we thought it would be easier to use the # in random conversations instead of forcing yourself to write 100 Tweets on your own. We had a lot of fun during our voting parties. Got to know many new ARMY as well as new AB members. Another project of this year was 'BTS are coming' in cooperation with 'analytics' an event to promote the comeback of 'LOVE YOURSELF 承 Her' as well as lots of mass votings during the voting season 2017/2018. This season was also the start of our voting teams organized and located on Twitter. 

 

2018 was the year we, as a base, experienced exponential growth. A lot of those who joined us in the previous voting season decided to stay and join AB as regular members. Some of them became our most loyal admins, leaders, and Brigadiers. We also started a team for the mere purpose to work on and collect hearts on the ‘Choeaedol’ app. Previously it was used for the voting for comebacks and Gaon Awards. AB was cooperating with another base and formed a strong force that was able to gain a huge number of votes, during a year, for our favorite boys. April was heading towards us and it should bring us another BBMA nomination, another voting. This time we wanted to not just vote and win the awards, but also use the voting itself for our benefit. We prepared a new project called ‘The Lyrics’. The idea was to promote BTS by their lyrics while voting for them. Every comeback got BTS’ MVs more and more views, but still, we ARMY, noticed that a lot of views get deleted, especially during the first days and weeks. Our fan base had a lot of thoughts on this problem, did a lot of research, experiments, and analyses, and came up with ‘Awen’. AB’s new way of streaming on YouTube. With BTS winning another BBMA and many more US awards as well as continuously rising their chart position and achieving incredible views on YouTube, different media outlets, magazines and shows got more and more interested, not just in BTS but also ARMY. This interest started projects like ‘Get to know BTS’ an Instagram live interview by Kevan Kenney. AB got to take the chance to join this interview with 2 of their main admins. The summer of 2018 brought us many contradicting feelings. We were extremely excited and at the same time deeply frightened. The new BTS world tour was approaching. The war for tickets was hard and tiring but many of us Brigadiers managed to win the battle. It so happened that some of us hit the jackpot with tickets for Berlin. Together with our good friend, the admin of a german BTS fan base, we applied for a banner project for the first day. We also managed to win this battle. Our last battle was rising enough funds and organizing the project itself. In the end, we managed to have the largest banners in BTS history with a beautiful slogan, and an amazing concert, and a bunch of unforgettable memories. Another successful project that was taking place around the venue itself was the distribution of trash bags to make sure no piece of garbage would end up lying around on the floor. Likewise, this year should end with a voting season. Many bases worked together to prepare ways of promoting and reminding ARMY to participate in the voting. One of them included a poster, created by our main designer, which caused a huge uproar on SNS, especially on Instagram. People believed Steve Aoki would participate in the 2018 MAMA show.

- Waste It On MAMA - At least we got ARMY attention. 

 

2019 started with a global event called 'Tear it up BTS' an event organized and realized with many other bases. We tried to break a Guinness record which unfortunately didn't work out but still got a lot of attention as many media outlets' Twitter accounts did use the trending hashtag. Although we weren't able to break the ‘Most tweeted hashtag in 24h’ the project was still a huge success. This year's BTS’ debut anniversary we wanted to celebrate with something special. Something that would make this world a little bit brighter. Giving children the ability to smile seemed like the perfect organization we wanted to support. Together with our members and followers, we were able to help ‘Operation Smile’ and stop a few more children from suffering from a lip and palate cleft. When there is a BTS anniversary there is also an ARMY anniversary. This was celebrated with a project for us ARMY alone. BTS brought us together and made us realize we all belong to the same family #ARMYmeansFamily. 

 

In August we lost our Twitter accounts but didn't give up and came back. Obviously, this year ended with another voting season. 2020 started with an announcement that made every ARMY squeak with excitement. A new world tour! Nothing did we know by then what this year will bring all of us. The concerts got canceled but not all of us wanted to give up on them this easily. Two ARMY got our attention and we helped them by realizing their dream of a ‘Concert for BTS’. It was held on the first day the tour should have originally started. ARMY shared their previous concert memories and other precious moments of BTS on all SNS. Sadly we had to lose our accounts another time, right before the launch of this concert. Our last project took place on TikTok. ARMY was asked to submit videos fitting the message of BTS’ new song ‘Life Goes On’.

 

Today we keep on educating and informing ARMY on all possible SNS. While we keep on going and continue with our work we had to change our vision and take a different look at what actually is more important for us. We want to focus more on our members. Grow stronger from within before taking another run on creating and launching new projects. Although, there is something in planning. There is no doubt we will promote and support BTS in everything they do. But first of all, we will ask ourselves what we as individuals can do before asking what we as a fandom could possibly do. 

 

With Love

ARMY Brigade