Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but I don’t remember seeing this level of tension between a main artist’s fandom and a featured artist’s fandom around a collaboration in quite the same way before. With the recent aespa and GD release, the online discourse between MYs and GD fans has become extremely heated.
From what I’ve seen, a portion of Korean MYs (idk what the reception was like from the i-MYs) expressed dissatisfaction with the feature itself even prior to the release, and some even went as far as saying they would avoid supporting the track specifically because of the collaboration. On the other side, GD fans have picked up on this and have been reacting strongly to the backlash directed at him as a featured artist.
But here’s where everything became multitudes worse. The MYs who were mostly against GD’s feature began to nitpick and criticize his lyrics in the song, calling them untrendy, old-school, and outright bad.
Then, Karina posted a message on Bubble just a couple of hours after release that really set things on fire. I personally interpret her message as an attempt to calm MYs down. However, the main issue is her use of the phrase “밉겠지만,” which in Korean can be grammatically and semantically dangerous(?) to use in this context. Grammatically, it’s not a conditional, but rather a concessive expression that can mean that she “expects this to be disliked”. Now, the subject of “this” is left implicit but it can be contextually assumed she’s either referring to the song, GD’s feature, or the entire decision behind the collab. However you choose to interpret it, it still carries a negative connotation.
Because of that, GD fans have interpreted it as indirectly centering the dissatisfaction around GD’s feature itself. They were already pissed from the backlash from a segment of MYs toward the collab in the days leading up to the release. And now they perceived Karina’s comment as further validation of that sentiment coming directly from the artist which exacerbated the issue so much.
And now, both fandoms have amplified their anger toward each other, and the discourse has largely devolved into mutual hostility rather than celebrating the release.
Like I said earlier, I don’t think Karina’s intent was to criticize or single out GD. She was probably(?) just trying to calm her fans. But she did make a mistake in her wording in a highly sensitive and already polarized context, which created unintended ambiguity that contributed to the escalation. At this point, both fandoms have lost all sense of reasoning and are just going at each other’s throats. I genuinely didn’t anticipate what is arguably one of the biggest kpop collaborations we’ve seen leading to this level of fallout.
submitted by /u/Organic-Cranberry955
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