To make a long story slightly shorter, Leehan from Boynextdoor did a dance challenge video with Baekseung from Epex in which it went viral for his seeming lack of effort in it. Lots of hate comments towards Leehan ensued and quickly went too far with body shaming sexual harassment calling him evil and a hannam etc you know how kpop stans regularly do things take what could be real criticism and completely go overboard. Baekseung got a lot of attention and sympathy and knetz started going to his fancams and praising (but mostly in relation to Leehan) him.
Fast forward to a month later and Baekseung starts a youtube channel with fellow member Mu in an attempt to ride the wave of newfound popularity. Okay fine that’s what you should be doing especially in this post Rescene world where that tactic worked. Unfortunately the introduction video immediately started things off the wrongest of feet because the thumbnail of it was a YouTube comment translating to
‘if you (baekseung) make a YouTube channel you will crush Leehan immediately’ Leehan was blurred out but literally why bother everyone knew what it was.
And so it started kicking off from there. KOnedoors immediately found evidence on Baekseung constantly bringing up the incident in barely coded words in fromn messages and especially a controversial Weibo live, talking about how he happily cries to all the comments of his new fancams when they’re exclusively filled with Leehan hate of the variety of ‘you’re so much better than him,‘ and the second video on his channel is a teaser for a video of him canoeing. If you didn’t know there’s an idiom in Korea that roughly translates to ’riding the waves of a bad situation’ and that idiom was plastered all over the thumbnail of that video too. So konedoors started filling up his comment section too with special emphasis that as doing this move as Senior to Leehan was extra tacky.
C9 changed the thumbnail barely a few hours ago a day after it had all blown up, locked the comments and put out a statement restating their commitment to artist respect and claiming they will delete any unrelated comments which was immediately mocked because their whole new marketing strategy was to disrespect another artist and their comment sections have been for a month swarmed with nary a mention until it was their artist being targeted for stuff C9 did.
What makes this even more of an own goal is that KOnedoors were actively not really defending Leehan that much. They were like ‘okay fine he deserves his licks for this’ and the only reason they started going hard on Baekseung was because of the thumbnail stunt. Which is why the ‘toxic onedoors bully poor nugu’ thing the few outlets (Pann, Koreaboo) reported on is very funny. Like if it was just to stop the ‘deserved‘ hate on their husbando they would have hated on Baekseung this hard a month.
C9’s love of controversy marketing has often bitten them on the behind. Never forget that Epex debuted with a tasteless mental health concept and did a comeback with a nazi concept and sung lyrics about kristalnacht until the backlash was too strong to ignore but I do feel like they bit off more than they could chew by using the hate train of a way more popular idol with more fans than them in order to grift off sympathy. ATP the drama side of me would on board if Baekseung told us about how Leehan was totally rude behind the scenes or something because at least being aggrieved would be a more human response than what it looks like which is cynically trying to ride someone’s else hate train at the expense of a junior idol that had already been going through it for the crime of not dancing hard enough for clout and a few clicks.
This is also just a terrible way to try and get new fans in general. Baekseung and C9 (I don’t know how much of this Baekseung is here for as opposed to just fully C9‘s doing but most fans think it’s not an insignificant amount is why a lot of this is aimed at him) seem to think that the people who are crapping on Leehan in favour of Baekseung are actually becoming fans of him instead of just using him to troll and hate on another person and is not about to stick around to buy albums or stream songs the moment they forget about this. In fact even some kfans of Epex were getting sick of this tactic. I found out about this whole saga because I saw a viral tweet from a kzenith who complained that he was disrespecting his original fans by pandering so hard on the toxic johnny come latelys at the expense of his real fans for example. And like wouldnt you? Does my wholesome support and love of you mean less than getting attention for youtube trolls? While there were pushback in the qrts many zeniths agreed so we have a case where Epex might actually lose real fans because of this tackines).
The sad thing is that it is by no means a new strategy that has never worked in kpop before. Remember after Le Sserafim’s Coachella performance when there was suddenly a whole wave of ‘live performances’ from rival groups. And like JYP when they pulled the ‘audio suddenly messes up and Nmixx sings a perfect acapella’ trick that had been planned, all it takes is one overzealous company to expose the lot. C9 is just straight stupid always has been always will be.
Anyway what do you think?
submitted by /u/Miserable-Elephant-3
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