Bunnies Fan Zines

Lore & Background

The zine culture surrounding NewJeans grew almost organically from the group's debut in 2022. Because NewJeans' public image is built on a sense of unscripted, everyday girlhood—school uniforms, grocery-store b-roll, casual laughter—fans felt an immediate pull toward analog, tactile media. A zine, with its imperfect binding and hand-lettered titles, felt like the natural physical counterpart to a group that refuses to feel over-produced.

Within the Bunnies community, zines carry a social function beyond aesthetics. They are often the centerpiece of fan-meet gatherings, where a small group of friends gathers in a café or a shared apartment to spread out pages, swap layouts, and critique each other's collage work. Some zines are created as collaborative projects across time zones, with one fan handling photography, another writing the essays, and a third managing the print run. The act of making something together, even across a screen, becomes a ritual of belonging.

There is also a gentle, unspoken etiquette in the Bunnies zine scene: zines are gifts first, products second. Many are distributed at fan events, left in community folders, or mailed to fellow fans as surprise parcels. The community treats each zine as a small, imperfect artifact of a specific moment in someone's fandom journey, and that imperfection is the point.

In Their Own Story

The apartment smelled like toner and cold coffee. Yuna spread the final spread across her kitchen table—fourteen pages of Danielle laughing with her eyes closed, a watercolor of Haerin's braid, a torn-out magazine page with the words 'summer, but make it 2003' handwritten in the margin. Her phone buzzed. A message from the group chat: 'Printing 30 copies tomorrow. Who's doing the envelopes?' She typed back a single bunny emoji, then held the page up to the window light, checking that the ink hadn't bled. Somewhere in Busan, in a small print shop, the first copies were already cooling on the rack. In three days, a stranger in Manila would open an unmarked envelope and find a little book that said, without words, *I saw you, and I made something because of it.*

Reader's Guide

It started, for most Bunnies, with a screenshot. A candid frame from a music show, a blurry photo from a behind-the-scenes clip, a single line of a lyric that hit too hard. Then came the urge to make it real, to hold it, to give it edges and a spine. The first zine is usually the most honest: a few pages printed at a local shop, stapled with a metal fastener, a title scrawled in whatever font felt right.

The community has its own small lexicon. A 'spread' is a two-page layout; a 'flip-book' is a zine that reads like a comic; 'staple-punk' is the affectionate term for deliberately rough, DIY binding. Inside jokes circulate around the group's aesthetic—referencing the 'grocery store era,' debating whether a particular outfit is 'Hyein-core' or 'Minji-core,' or using the phrase 'it's giving bunnies in a library' to describe a zine that's too soft and pastel.

Creating is the core ritual. Fans draft layouts in Canva or Procreate, write short essays about a specific song's feeling, collage magazine clippings, and trade feedback in Discord servers or KakaoTalk groups. Small fan-club chapters in cities like Seoul, Bangkok, and Jakarta host zine-swap nights where members bring their latest print and trade copies. The group's reciprocal warmth—NewJeans' own emphasis on fun, low-pressure creativity—makes the community feel like a friend group rather than a fandom hierarchy.

What binds it all is the feeling that you made something small and true, and someone else will hold it in their hands and feel the same thing you did at 2 a.m. when you first pressed print.

Did You Know?

• Bunnies zines often mirror NewJeans' own visual language—Y2K textures, soft pastels, and candid photography—making them look almost like an extension of the group's official art direction, yet entirely fan-made.
• Many zines are produced in small runs of 20–50 copies and distributed as gifts at fan-meet events rather than sold, reinforcing the community's 'gift first, product second' ethos.
• The multilingual nature of the Bunnies community means zines appear in Korean, English, Vietnamese, Thai, and other languages, creating a quiet global exchange of fan creativity.
• Because NewJeans' debut in 2022 coincided with a broader K-pop trend toward analog and tactile fan media, the Bunnies zine scene grew rapidly alongside the group's rise, with new collectives forming within months of debu