I’ve stumbled across this sub genre of kpop content on YouTube so I don’t know if this is a thing on every platform, but there’s definitely a bunch of people making these types of videos on YouTube. Most of these channels whole thing is documenting the things sasaengs have done to idols or in general. In theory this isn’t a terrible thing, it’s probably good to have a record of what these people have done for various reasons and it probably helps other kpop stans learn where the boundaries are and hopefully not fall down the rabbit hole of becoming a new sasaeng. However after watching a couple of these videos I’ve noticed pretty much all of them do this thing where they call people “alleged sasaengs”. What does that mean, basically it means they have an “insider source” who tells them all of the horrible things this person allegedly did and then don’t show proof of them doing said thing.
Now most of the sasaengs these creators cover are actually sasaengs who have done illegal, immoral and unethical shit in the name of their idols, which is why it’s so jarring when the next video is an “alleged sasaeng.” For example I saw this video on a girl who had a pretty viral fan call with an idol, and at first I was like “oh no is she a sasaeng?” And as the video progressed I was confused because they were not talking about anything out of the ordinary for kpop stans and then suddenly the tone shifted and the creator said “she went to the idol’s house, was seen at the same hotel as the idol group when they were on tour and were at the gym of this hotel (it’s noticeably not said what time they were there but it’s heavily implied that this fan was there specifically to see that idol group/idol).” Now I want to be very clear if these things did happen, yeah that would be way too far and I would also consider them a sasaeng, however I also find it very interesting that when the creator started talking about the actual stuff that would qualify them a sasaeng they had to give a disclaimer that there was no proof for any of this.
Another example is I watched one about a Chinese sasaeng and the whole basis for looking into that one was the fact that she regularly calls her bias in a group “husband” in Chinese. Now I assume this creator does not speak Chinese considering they solely used the translation feature on Instagram to talk about what this person said, which is especially bad because in China (as far as I know) fans tend to call male idols the Chinese word for husband whereas Korean fans tend to use oppa which is older brother in Korean. Yeah, both sound like a lot when you translate them to English but apparently only one of them is acceptable, and if the creator does speak Chinese that seems like an incredibly important detail to leave out. I did not watch the rest of the video after they said that because it was very clear that this creator didn’t do enough research into the topic to watch the entire 40 minute video so that person might have been an actual sasaeng but I will never know.
I understand that sasaeng is a very loaded word and it’s genuinely something incredibly important to talk about. However I’m tired of the fact that any random person can go on twitter or whatever and accuse someone of something and everyone just believes it. Look at T-ARA, look at AOA hell look at the Woojin (ex Stray Kids) situation, when are we going to learn that people do in fact go on the internet and lie, they can lie about minor things or incredibly serious things and we have to stop taking everything at face value. It’s incredibly irresponsible to be putting random people’s faces on blast because they’re an “alleged sasaeng” when you usually cover actual sasaengs, this isn’t a fun little word to throw around because you don’t like someone or you couldn’t be bothered to do research or whatever, this is an INCREDIBLY serious accusation and if you want to accuse someone of actually being one you better have actual fucking proof.
submitted by /u/Strawberry_0cean
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