I’m thinking especially about people who think the comments (YT, knetz…) are from paid shills or AI generated, etc.
Yeah probably a lot of them! But these sorts of comments (1) draw from a public sentiment that is very real, and (2) could only be convincing to people if they reflected something real.
On (1) – It’s a fact that a lot of Kpop fans – especially domestic fans who were young in the heyday of 2nd-3rd gen kpop (which includes a lot of big spender unnie fans) – feel that there has been a decline in both musical quality/perceived ‘Kpop authenticity’ and average talent. You don’t have to agree with this take to know that it is everywhere. My point is that this is a REAL and WIDESPREAD sentiment, which both lends some plausibility to the idea that much if not most of the engagement is genuine, and shows imo that a lot of the hype/engagement RESULTING from these comments must be genuine, even if many comments themselves are fake.
(Note I am not making any claims about whether the overall engagement is mostly real or mostly paid; very hard to make any such claims in this day and age. I do think they’ve got more genuine positive engagement than most big hybe ggs did at debut though, and I think it’s plausible that it’s mostly genuine.)
Leading onto (2) – The fact that so many real people DO believe the comments are genuine, including here on reddit, shows that the debut is at least good enough to generally LIVE UP TO the glowing comments, regardless of whether these are genuine. And that in itself is very impressive, since the comments are reaaaally glowing. The fact that LSM chose a ‘mini BoA’ narrative for Aijing and a lot of people (even if not everyone!) actually AGREED tells you a lot about how good she is. That could not have gone down as well in any other recently debuted group. Same for the whole android level perfection narrative, the vocalists who are unexpectedly good at dancing/dancers who are unexpectedly good at singing narrative, and the eating CD narrative. The comments make you look at the performance with certain expectations, and startlingly I think many people found that they were met.
(On this, personally I found their first encore a bit mid, and then was shocked by how good their later encore stages were. The narrative I’m not convinced by is that they’re vocally on par with 2nd gen. Vocally they’re on good footing but their main vocals are closer to like, Twice’s Jihyo / Nayeon / Jeongyeon or worse, than to SNSD or f(x) or RV. Better than H2H but not by that much.)
Basically, I’m saying that even if LSM is truly going ham on the payola/mediaplay, that doesn’t take away from how impressive the debut is (numbers aside, I suppose – but I think the numbers are at least PLAUSIBLY mostly genuine, for reasons above). Those tactics could only be as effective as they have been if there was something to resonate with, and there is. It’s silly to say that it’s ALL payola, and actually the song is bad and the members are mid. The song IS good: YYJ’s signature sound & polish, very Lucifer, very The Boys, very early SJ. If you like those songs, as so many do, you just probably will like Neon. The members ARE good, too, although there you do have to wonder how much of that is due to being given a song/choreo that is actually designed to show their skill (vs. all this easy listening tik tok stuff… I feel like TUIDE was fumbled tbh. Sun Kissed Voice is a good song, it just doesn’t highlight their strong points at all).
But maybe I’m missing something since I do have YYJ type tastes lol. And yeah ofc goes without saying that the members are children, the industry is very deeply immoral, etc – but all that is besides the point for what I want to say here
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