Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Suho of EXO has recently come under fire from netizens for insensitive remarks he made about people suffering from mental illness on a recent Instagram Live broadcast by Sehun.
During Sehun’s Instagram Live session on the 17th, Sehun asked Suho to come make faces for the filter. Suho made a few joking attempts and then said, “It’s weird. People will think I’m a mentally ill patient.”
Suho was criticized by Korean netizens for his remarks as they demanded an apology from him because it’s basically closer to a slur than not.
If it sounds oddly specific and targeted for Suho to say "mentally ill person", it's a common Korean phrase.
Clearly a bad one, but common nonetheless. I guess it's close to where "retarded" was in the West a decade ago.
We're moving on from using it in normal conversation.
— John Yoo (@oniontaker) March 21, 2018
It’s not … good, put it that way.
Predictably, there were denials by EXO fans, and they all went along the same lines. One of the most popular ones was this:
[suho on sehun's ig live]sehun: its ok hyung u can do this, quick! hurry up! open ur mouth widely
suho: AAH (๑•́o•̀๑)
sehun: no.. again! do it properly
suho: AAH ٩( *˙0˙*)۶
sehun: no, its like this. 1 more time
suho: people will think im strange
sehun: why would they think so pic.twitter.com/XMxEpC427F— 엑소 수호 김준면 #실례해도될까요 #Dinner ? (@kimjunmyeonnews) March 17, 2018
All that is correct.
At this point I was prepared to either ignore this or defend him, but the problem is that the clip used is from 3:12 to 3:32 in the following video, and that is not the section that people had a problem with. Rather, it’s the section that starts immediately following the end of the clip from around 3:33 to 3:37.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_-hH9lLyMk&feature=youtu.be&t=3m25s
Yes, before it became a mess, even a translator that is a Sehun fan translated “정신병자” as “mentally ill”.
When this was brought up to the translator that gave the explanation above, they admitted that it would be a problem if he said “정신병자”.
Note: Do not go after this account, I only used these tweets cause it was frequently linked as a defense and showed what the common fandom defense was. Thanks.
So there definitely doesn’t appear to be a translation error or anything like that (Update: Yeah, definitely not.), it’s just a matter of what you feel about Suho using questionable terminology in reference to the mentally ill and associating mental illness with weird or funny faces.
As somebody who does deal with mental illness, I’m not personally outraged about it or anything, but I do understand people who are mad about it. Mainly I just feel like it was certainly a dumb thing to say, and I’d hope that it was just an inappropriate jab where he was trying to be funny and not reflective of any type of deeper feelings.
